Former President Donald J. Trump’s false comments about pet-eating Haitian immigrants are the latest in a pattern of attacks against people from the Caribbean nation.
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An asylum seeker from Haiti was cleaning the kitchen of a migrant shelter in Tijuana, Mexico, as former President Donald J. Trump debated Vice President Kamala Harris this month.
Former President Donald J. Trump had been in office for less than six months when he made clear his disdain for people from Haiti, offering a revealing prelude to his recent embrace of false rumors about Haitians eating pets in an Ohio town.
He insisted one afternoon in 2017 that immigrants from Haiti should not be let into the United States, shocking his chief of staff, secretary of state, homeland security secretary and others gathered in the Oval Office by declaring that people from the beleaguered nation “all have AIDS.”
Now, as he runs for a second term, Mr. Trump is once again denigrating Haitians, part of a pattern that goes back years and appears to have its roots in the early 1980s, when the Centers for Disease Control stigmatized Haitians as a particular threat in the spread of AIDS, driving years of panic about the newly discovered disease.
Mr. Trump, a self-described germophobe, has persisted in that debunked belief even though it was formally abandoned by the C.D.C. nearly four decades ago.
“We have hundreds of thousands of people flowing in from Haiti. Haiti has a tremendous AIDS problem,” the former president told Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, in October 2021. “Many of those people will probably have AIDS, and they’re coming into our country. And we don’t do anything about it.”
In his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris last week, Mr. Trump singled out Haitians for ridicule. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats,” he said. “They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” He promised to conduct mass deportations of Haitians if he returns to the White House.
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