Former President Donald Trump made headlines during the first debate with Kamala Harris for the presidency of the United States by claiming that immigrants eat the dogs and cats of residents in border cities.
"Millions of people arrive in our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and asylums. (...) They are taking over the cities. They are occupying buildings. They are entering violently," he stated.
"Many cities do not want to talk about it because they are embarrassed. In Springfield [Ohio], people who came are eating dogs, they are eating cats, they are eating the pets of the people who live there, and this is what is happening in our country and it is a shame," pointed out the Republican candidate for the November elections.
Her rival Kamala Harris initially showed astonishment before immediately bursting into laughter.
In light of the seriousness of the accusations, ABC News presenter David Muir quickly intervened to correct the former president: "I just want to clarify this. You mention Springfield, Ohio, and ABC News reached out to the city administrator there. We were told that there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community," he emphasized.
Trump and his running mate for vice president, JD Vance, have said that Haitian immigrants have been "causing chaos" in a city in Ohio and kidnapping pets to eat them.
"Months ago, I raised the issue of illegal Haitian immigrants who are depleting social services and, in general, causing chaos throughout Springfield, Ohio," Vance wrote on Twitter on September 9.
"Reports show that there are people who have seen their pets kidnapped and devoured by individuals who shouldn't be in this country. Where is our border czar?" he wrote.
Local authorities have already come out to deny those rumors.
According to ABC, the origin of Trump's claim about immigrants coming to the United States and supposedly eating pets comes from an incident that occurred in Canto, captured in a video circulated on the Internet, where several police officers are seen going to a house after being alerted about a woman who apparently killed her cat and then ate it.
Witnesses claimed that the woman, a 27-year-old American, allegedly stepped on the animal's head to eat it "in front of several people." She was arrested on August 16th.
According to the tracking by the fact-checking site Politifact, on September 6, a Facebook post claimed: "Under the government of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, 20,000 Haitian immigrants were sent to the city. Now the ducks and pets are disappearing," which apparently sparked the rumor on social media.
The post, which has already been deleted, included a screenshot of a post in which a person talked about a woman who saw a dismembered cat hanging from a tree in her Haitian neighbor's yard. The author of the post added that Haitians do that to dogs, ducks, and geese in a local park, and shared a photo of a Black man in the street with a dead goose.
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