posted July 04, 2025 03:52 PM            

A Report from Springfield, Ohio

Stories come and go. That’s the nature of the news. Something happens, somewhere, and a storm of media attention descends on a place and its people. That high-powered global spotlight can help; it can mean aid to disaster victims, justice where injustice has been done, prayers and compassion in a tragedy. And then there’s the other side—sensationalism, the inconvenience and burdens of a media invasion, and a pack mentality about the story that, too often, gets the story wrong.

I loved covering big breaking news stories in my years as a network news reporter. It’s one of the ultimate challenges in that work, even though you’re often covering something awful. To get there first, to grasp what’s happening, to get the right “gets”—those people with the most important and intense stories to tell; and most of all, to take the risk of opening your heart to the magnitude of what you’re witnessing. If you do it right, it takes something out of you.

Then, quickly, the spotlight shifts. Something else happens, somewhere else. But of course, the story isn’t over for the ones who are living it.

Last fall, during the presidential campaign, J. D. Vance and Donald Trump triggered a firestorm of media attention on the city of Springfield, Ohio. They did it with an absurd and vicious slander. A racist slander. They scapegoated and persecuted an entire community of people, the roughly 15,000 Haitians who have moved to the city in recent years, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding, hardworking people helping Springfield rise from decades of decline. Trump and Vance had only the basest of motives for this attack: political gain.

The lives of many of the Haitians in Springfield have been ruined now. They fled the nightmarish political persecutions and gang violence in Haiti (many were fleeing death threats), and they made a home in our country under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation, first granted to Haitians in 2010. Now all that is gone. Trump revoked TPS for more than a half-million Haitians in the US, and though a federal judge has temporarily blocked deportations, the end result is clear to see. Even though the mayor, the city council, the governor of Ohio, business leaders and church leaders here do not want the Haitians to be deported—they almost certainly will have to go.

So Springfield is still reckoning with the costs of Trump’s wretched political ploy, which is now US policy.

I was in the city during the campaign last fall, after Trump delivered his “they’re-eating-the-pets” lie in the presidential debate. It was a media madhouse then. Not any more.

I’d long wanted to go back to Springfield, and see how this quiet, middle-American city is faring after all the political madness. Last week—joined by Steve and Anne Cocklins, a veteran news crew who share a deep commitment to telling important stories—I did. Here’s our report. We hope you like it.