Pooja Bhatia in The Baffler: Home City, USA
Originally published in The Baffler, September 2025
Pooja Bhatia is a UNHR clinical supervisor leading investigations into the right to livelihood for Haitian migrants. She has written about Haiti for many years.
Throughout the years, boosters of Springfield, Ohio, have chosen nicknames that suggest a welcoming, prosperous city. “Champion City” pays tribute to the nineteenth-century farm-implements company that made the Champion reaper and later became part of International Harvester, helping to seed an economic boom that lasted into the 1920s. “City of Roses” comes from the same era, when Springfield grew more roses than any other city. “Home City” alludes to the charitable homes for orphans and the elderly built by the turn of the twentieth century—casting Springfield as a kind of refuge.
But Home City became a cruel misnomer during the 2024 presidential campaign, when Springfield was targeted by Republicans and white nationalists who incited public hostility toward its growing community of Haitian immigrants. Having escaped violence and persecution in Haiti, many of the newcomers mistook Springfield for a safe haven. The inauguration of Donald Trump, who seems to harbor special animus toward Haitians, ended that. By April, when I visited the city, thousands of Haitian residents were lying low or in hiding or had fled, fearing the prospect of a state-sponsored purge. Mass deportations would come, they and others in town believed; the only question was when. Uncertainty became a terror unto itself.
