The hateful lie pushed by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets not only endangered those migrants, it also led to an Ohio sheriff three hours away threatening citizens who show support for the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
In a Sept. 13 Facebook post that he later claimed “may have been a little misinterpreted,” Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski suggested tracking “all the addresses of the people who had [Harris] signs in their yards” so that “when the Illegal human ‘Locust’ (which she supports!) Need places to live...We’ll already have the addresses of their New families...who supported their arrival!”
There’s no misinterpreting the racism in that post, described to me by the county’s NAACP president as ‘vile and egregious.’
There’s no misinterpreting the racism in that post, described to me by the county’s NAACP president as “vile and egregious.” There’s no excusing the lie from the sheriff that Springfield’s Haitians — who are there as part of a federal humanitarian program for migrants — are here illegally. On top of that, referring to human beings as pests (ravenous pests, at that) has preceded too many global atrocities for Zuchowski’s hateful statements to be excused.
And that’s before we get to heart of the matter, which is that Zuchowski veered into unconstitutional territory with the suggestion that residents lawfully expressing a political opinion warrant law enforcement’s attention. Zuchowski’s defense — that he has a “First Amendment right” to post what he did — is doubly offensive. His status as a public servant ought to come before his desire to express his opinion, and his post made his constituents afraid their government would be monitoring their constitutionally protected expression of speech.
Zuchowski, who has declined to speak to NBC News and multiple media outlets, took down his post after the Portage County NAACP and the League of Women Voters complained to the Ohio secretary of state, and as the Ohio ACLU was gearing up to sue him. But if Zuchowski succeeded in making people afraid that he and his deputies are watching their political activity, it seems unlikely that his deleting the post is enough to make them breathe easy.
On its face, the story out of Portage County, where there are people I know well who vote, is evidence that a malignant lie about an innocent immigrant population metastasized into a threat against innocent citizens hours away. But it’s also part of what appears to be a larger campaign from conservatives to bully everybody else into political inactivity or silence.
In Florida, voters who signed a petition that put that state’s abortion referendum on the ballot cried foul at being questioned by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ election police unit. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton executed search warrants against members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), one of America’s oldest Latino civil rights groups, about two weeks after LULAC endorsed Harris’ presidential campaign. He says he was investigating “allegations of election fraud and vote harvesting” in 2022. The Republican National Committee’s so-called “Protect the Vote” project aims to recruit people from the suburbs to monitor the polls in urban Democratic strongholds, which it has falsely declared are hotbeds of voting fraud.
“I’ve never felt less protected and more scared than I do right now,” a resident of Ravenna, Ohio, wrote Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, according to the Akron Beacon Journal. At least 59 residents complained to Yost’s office, the paper reported. Zuchowski “has made me feel unsafe in my home of 24 years,” a Kent resident said.
Portage County NAACP President Renee Romine said at the emergency meeting her organization held about Zuchowski’s post that there were “people almost in tears” and “not wanting to go to the voting polls” because Zuchowki’s office provides security for in-person absentee voting. “People did not even want to go and vote if they were going to be there.”
He backed down, which is what we wanted. Not just what we wanted, it’s what the Constitution required him to do.
The county’s board of elections voted to remove the sheriff’s office from that security role, which Romine described as a “big win for the people.” But to Freda Levenson, the legal director of the ACLU of Ohio, the win was Zuchowski removing the offending post.
“We were going to ask a federal judge to make him take down his post. So as soon as he took down his post, we no longer had anything to ask for,” she said. “He backed down, which is what we wanted. Not just what we wanted, it’s what the Constitution required him to do.”
But what the ACLU counts as a win may be cold comfort to Portage County voters. He made a post about monitoring who’s supporting Harris. There’s no reason they should believe that his being forced to take the post down has been accompanied by any change of heart.