John Legend slams Donald Trump's 'lies' that Haitian immigrants eat pets in his hometown

The singer's birthplace of Springfield, Ohio, has been subject to vicious Republican attacks. "No one is eating cats," he says.

John Legend wants to correct the record about his hometown. The famous singer was born in Springfield, Ohio, and in a video posted to his Instagram last week, he defended his hometown from recent attempts by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance to stir up hatred against the population of Haitian immigrants.

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What started as a viral Facebook post claiming that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were killing and eating cats has been amplified by Vance (who told Twitter followers last week to "keep the cat memes flowing") and Trump (who repeated the claim during his televised debate with Vice President Kamala Harris last week). But according to Springfield authorities, there's no truth to the claim, with police telling the Springfield News-Sun that they have received no reports of such incidents and it's “not something that’s on our radar right now."

In Legend's Instagram video, he implored people to treat Springfield's Haitian population with the same respect as other American immigrant groups, rather than fall for Trump's "lies."

"I think all of us need to have the same kind of grace that we would want our ancestors to have when they moved here with our Haitian brothers and sisters who moved here too," Legend said. "Nobody's eating cats, nobody's eating dogs. We all just want to live and flourish and raise our families in a healthy and safe environment. How about we love one another?"

Legend, who was born John R. Stephens, continued, "I grew up in the Christian tradition, which said to love our neighbor as we love ourselves and treat strangers as though they might be Christ. So how about we adopt that ethos when we talk about immigrants moving to our communities and don't spread hateful, xenophobic, racist lies about them?"

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Elsewhere in the video, Legend offered context about why there are so many new Haitian immigrants in Springfield. It's a familiar American story.

"Our city had been shrinking for decades. We didn't have enough jobs, we didn't have enough opportunity, so people left and went somewhere else. When I was there, we had upwards of 75,000 people, but in the last five years, we were down to like 60,000 people. But of late during the Biden administration, there have been more jobs that opened up, more manufacturing jobs, more plants and factories that needed employees and were ready to hire people. So we had a lot of job opportunities and we didn't have enough people in our town of 60,000 people to fill those jobs."

Legend continued, "during the same time, there had been upheaval and turmoil in Haiti and the federal government granted visas and immigration status to a certain number of Haitian immigrants so they could come to our country legally. Our demand in Springfield for additional labor met up with the supply of additional Haitian immigrants."

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Legend acknowledges that there are challenges with integrating so many new arrivals into an existing community, but that there's no culture clash on the level of killing pets.

Local businessmen have spoken well of their Haitian employees, with McGregor Metal CEO Jamie MacGregor telling a TV interviewer, "I wish I had 30 more. Our Haitian associates come to work every day, they don’t have drug problems, they’ll stay at their machines, they’ll achieve their numbers, they are here to work. That's a stark difference from what we’re used to in our community.”

Hopefully these words sink in soon, but for now Springfield remains unsettled by these false claims and the violent threats they have inspired. The Springfield News-Sun reported that the Springfield City School District evacuated two elementary schools on Monday due to unspecified threats, marking the third consecutive school day affected by similar threats.

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