By Steve Wishnia

“We will not stand for racism, bias, and discrimination,” Brooklyn Assemblymember Stefanie Zinerman told about 100 health-care workers on the sidewalk outside Interfaith Medical Center September 18. “We love pets. We do not eat pets!”

That last statement should have been obvious, but for the previous 10 days, former President Donald Trump and Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance had been persistently pushing false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating people’s cats and dogs.

To protest this and support Haitians and other immigrants, 1199SEIU organized three rallies: one at Interfaith, on Atlantic Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant; one at Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park; and one near Nassau Coliseum, in Uniondale, Long Island, where Trump was speaking that night.

“The caregivers of 1199SEIU stand in solidarity with the Haitian community in the face of vicious, racist attacks by Donald Trump and JD Vance,” 1199SEIU President George Gresham said in a statement. He blasted the duo for “spreading hate and blaming immigrants for the challenges our country is facing” because they don’t have “any real plan to improve the lives of the American people.”

Charon Rostant, a behavioral health associate at nearby Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, said she came out to “support my Haitian brothers and sisters” and let it be known that what Trump said was “unacceptable” for a presidential candidate.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she added. “It’s positively disgusting.”

It’s about human rights, said Cardinal Worrell, an engineer at Interfaith, pointing to his “Say Yes to Haitian Workers” sign. “Respect them,” he added. “Disrespect goes a long way. We are all immigrants. We all eat.”

“They are all welcome here,” said accounts-receivable clerk Margie Singh.

“No one is safe from former President Trump’s very hateful and divisive comments,” 1199SEIU senior executive vice president Veronica Turner-Biggs told Work-Bites. “We are all trying to make a living and make our communities better.”

Central Brooklyn is home to thousands of Haitians and other Afro-Caribbean immigrants, many of whom work in health care. 1199 says it has thousands of members from the Haitian diaspora, and Gresham praises their “extraordinary” contributions to the field of health care and the labor movement.

“I work with the community. These are my people,” says a creative-arts therapist who gives her first name, Linden.

“We know that our immigrant community is critical to the health and well-being of Central Brooklyn,” said Dr. Sophia Kostelanetz, a primary-care physician for One Brooklyn Health, which operates Interfaith and Brookdale hospitals and various other facilities.

She says she moved to Brooklyn because she wanted to live and work in that community and send her kids to school there. She’d worked for two years in Saint-Marc, a city in Haiti’s Artibonite department.

As for Trump and Vance’s ethnic slurs, Dr. Kostelanetz says, “This is the same old tired story, connected to the long arc of history.”

Vance keeps scratching

Senator Vance claimed to CNN Sept. 15 that he had ten “verifiable and confirmable” stories from constituents about immigrants in Springfield eating pets. But even if they weren’t true, he said, “if I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do. I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris’ policies.”

Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, a Republican, responded that that a sheriff’s investigation of all complaints over the past 11 months had found “no verifiable claim” that immigrants were stealing pets.

Springfield, a small industrial city between Dayton and Columbus, had seen its population decline to 58,000 after major printing and farm-machinery plants closed. But in the past few years, the city government estimates it received 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants, as industry revived in the area. Most of the Haitians there were admitted under Temporary Protected Status, which enables immigrants from countries plagued by violence or natural disasters to stay in the U.S. and work legally.

Since Trump declared “they are eating the dogs” during the Sept. 10 presidential debate, at least two local hospitals and three city schools have been shut down or evacuated temporarily after receiving bomb threats.

Vance has continued to spit up anti-immigrant hairballs. On Sept. 14, he retweeted a video that far-right activist Christopher Rufo claimed proved that “African migrants” in Dayton “barbecued these cats last summer.”

Vance told CBS News the next day that some immigrants have “cultural practices that seem very far out there to a lot of Americans. Are we not allowed to talk about this in the United States of America?”

In reality, while the Rufo video shows cats wandering the back yard, the animal bodies on the grill look a lot more like plucked chickens.

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