The origin of the unfounded claim seems to be a private Facebook group called “Springfield Ohio Crime and Information,” according to NewsGuard, an apolitical fact-checking organisation launched in 2018 by journalist Steven Brill and news executive Gordon Crovitz.

A screenshot of a post to the group circulated widely, with an unnamed person claiming that the cat of a friend’s daughter had been hung “from a branch, like you’d do a deer for butchering, & they were carving it up to eat,” referring to a house where Haitian immigrants lived. “They have been doing it at snyder park with the ducks and geese, as I was told that last bit by Rangers & police.”

A conservative account on X that has 2.9 million followers, End Wokeness, posted in reply the following day: “Springfield is a small town in Ohio. 4 years ago, they had 60k residents. Under Harris and Biden, 20,000 Haitian immigrants were shipped to the town. Now ducks and pets are disappearing.” The post was viewed 4.8 million times and received 69,000 likes in four days.

Springfield’s city leaders have said the town has seen roughly 15,000 – 20,000 Haitian immigrants come to their community.

After the claim began spreading, the Springfield Police Division told the local paper, the Springfield News-Sun, in an article published Monday that the allegations were “not something that’s on our radar right now”. On Monday, the police issued a statement “to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.” Messages to the Springfield police department asking them to expand on their statement were not returned.

Nevertheless, some social media users pointed to a video of a black woman being arrested for reportedly killing and eating a cat in a driveway. Right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong posted the video to X on August 21. After another X user responded by asking if drugs were involved in the incident, Cheong replied on Saturday: “Worse. Haitians.”

That August incident was not filmed in Springfield but Canton, Ohio, and featured a woman who “has no known connection to Haiti or any other foreign country,” according to the Canton Repository newspaper. A representative from the Canton police department wrote in an email that the woman was “a US citizen that was born in Canton, Ohio. We would have no additional comment at this time.”

Another viral post featured a photo of a black man carrying a dead goose down the street, but that image was also from another part of Ohio and contained no evidence that the man pictured was Haitian, according to the man who took the photo and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to the local Columbus Dispatch. The Washington Post was not able to independently confirm his identity.

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Before bursting into mainstream Republican discourse, the meme began on the far right.

One of the first prominent right-wing influencers to interact with the theme retweeted a post Saturday afternoon linking the claim to Vice President Kamala Harris’s supposed policies. Soon a second influencer, Andrew Torba, a Christian nationalist who is the founder and chief executive of the far-right social network Gab, posted the link to the Springfield Facebook post. Other influencers began posting about it on Sunday, and the first influencer retweeted a post by an account whose social media feed is full of racial slurs. By Monday afternoon before the debate, some 159 right-wing influencers – and 23 Republican politicians, candidates or party officials – had discussed the meme online.

The allegation that Haitians in Springfield were killing waterfowl was spread by the conservative Federalist website, which on Tuesday published a report from the Clark County sheriff’s office showing that a resident told a police dispatcher in a call that he had witnessed four Haitian migrants, each carrying a goose.

“I’m sitting here, I’m riding on the trail, I’m going to my orientation for my job today, and I see a group of Haitian people, there was about four of ’em, they all had geese in their hand,” the caller said.

The notion “spread because the anti-immigrant wing of the extreme far, far right amplified this as part of their ‘let in the Third World, become the Third World’ narrative,” said Megan Squire, deputy director for data analytics at the Southern Poverty Law Centre and a former professor of Computer Science at Elon University, where she studied the spread of extremism and hate online.

“It’s moved quickly because of the video evidence, the fact that it involved cats on the internet and because of the racial and immigration overtones.”

In a follow-up message, Squire added that, “‘People from Third World countries aren’t like us because they do __[thing we don’t do]__’ has been a narrative for a long time, but people are using these unrelated videos as evidence of that ‘Third World’ narrative.”

Republican elected officials at the highest levels of government embraced the memes to damage Harris’s prospects. Republican Senator Ted Cruz posted his version, as did congressman Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Arizona’s conservative firebrand and Senate candidate Kari Lake.

Long before messages circulated on social media, Springfield city manager Bryan Heck wrote a letter to senators Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, and Republican Tim Scott from South Carolina.

“Springfield, Ohio is facing a significant housing crisis in our community,” Heck wrote, an issue he attributed to what he said was an influx of up to 20,000 Haitians into “a community of just under 60,000 previous residents.”

Vance was copied on the July 8 letter, and the next day, when questioning Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell in a committee hearing, he cited it as a sign that immigration is harmful to the US economy.

Over the summer, the white-supremacist neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe marched through Springfield carrying swastika flags to protest against the Haitian population in town. A member of that group attended a city meeting in late August to warn that “crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in”, he said.

But on Tuesday evening, just hours before the debate, Nathan Clark, the father of the 11-year-old boy whose death last summer heightened anti-immigrant tensions in Springfield, approached the podium at another city meeting to deliver a very different message.

“I wish that my son Aidan Clark was killed by a 60-year-old white man,” he said, noting how “blunt” his words must seem. “If that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone.” Clark, a Democrat, added that “the last thing that we need is to have the worst day of our lives violently and constantly shoved in our faces, but even that’s not good enough for them. They take it one step further.”

He accused both Vance and Trump of using his son’s death for political purposes, which he deemed “reprehensible.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to an email seeking comment, and a call and email to Vance was not returned.

‘Discredited allegations’

“I was appalled by the comment,” said Alix Desulme, the Haitian American mayor of North Miami, Florida, referring to Vance’s original statements. Desulme described his city as having the largest concentration of Haitian Americans in the country. He accused Vance and others of damaging the reputation of Springfield and fuelling division and hostility “over allegations that have been discredited”. Desulme arrived in the United States more than three decades ago and remembers allegations, later discredited, that Haitians were unusually susceptible to the AIDS virus.

“Whenever they need a group of people to bash on, it’s Haitians,” Desulme said. “They don’t look at us as people.” He bemoaned Trump’s repeated attacks on Haiti, including referring to it alongside African nations when he was president as “shithole” countries.

In an interview Tuesday night on CNN, Vance chastised the coverage of the false claims when he asserted that “the media didn’t care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats”. But his statement ignored major stories focused on Springfield and the Haitian immigration debate that published before Vance and others created memes about the issue.

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Leading up to Tuesday’s debate, Trump shared on social media altered images of himself protecting various pets, in what appeared to be a reference to the Springfield claim.

The memes took on a more menacing look in social media platforms used by far-right extremists such as the Proud Boys and armed groups.

Seemingly overnight, the same forums that days ago were preoccupied with an imagined Venezuelan takeover of Colorado shifted to fearmongering about Haitians in Ohio. In these forums, the racism is overt, such as memes of Trump in a suit carrying kittens to safety while being pursued by a mob of shirtless Black men. Or jokes about calling the authorities when French-speaking black people move into the neighbourhood.

Haitians invariably were shown in tropes portraying them as dangerous savages; images of guns and other weapons are sometimes presented as “the answer” to a refugee “problem.” Hate trackers say they’re concerned about the risk of such dehumanising language and imagery fuelling violence toward black people and immigrants. Mass shooters in El Paso and Buffalo are among several far-right attackers who have cited racist, xenophobic rhetoric as a justification for bloodshed.

Kathleen Belew, a historian of US white supremacist movements, wrote on X on Tuesday that such demonisation campaigns are an old tactic that should be taken seriously. The debunked claims about Haitian refugees aren’t “just nonsense,” Belew warned. “The people spreading this rhetoric either know exactly what they’re doing, or they should know. But violence follows. Every time.”

There were panics about refugees eating rats in the 1980s. These were quickly followed by hate crimes against refugees, spearheaded by white power activists but employing local communities incited by that rhetoric, she said.

On Tuesday morning, Vance appeared to give himself a way out of the pet-eating claims when he posted a social media message that “it’s possible, of course, that all of these rumours will turn out to be false”.

But the message was already becoming part of the landscape. By Tuesday, the Arizona GOP had erected billboards around the Phoenix area: “EAT LESS KITTENS. Vote Republican!”