Sen. J.D. Vance tells the story of immigration scumbags in Springfield, Ohio: “It wasn’t the cat meme that attacked our city,” he told CNN

Sen. JD Vance stood by his false claim that Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio — an unsupported story that former President Donald Trump has also echoed on the debate stage and on social media.

Mr. Vance said that the claims — which have been debunked by city officials in Springfield, and which resemble smears that have been lodged against immigrants for decades — had come from “firsthand” accounts from his constituents. He called one of his interviewers a “Democratic propagandist” for connecting his words and Mr. Trump’s to the bomb threats, and told another that she should “ignore” the threats and focus on Vice President Kamala Harris’s immigration policies instead.

The media ignored this until Donald Trump and I talked about cat meme. I’m not going to create stories if the American media pays attention to the suffering of the Americans.

When the CNN host, Dana Bash, noted that he had used the word “creating,” Mr. Vance replied, “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”

Vance has argued that the media isn’t paying enough attention to unchecked immigration and the impact it’s having on smaller cities. Springfield, which has around 60,000 residents, has received some 15,000-20,000 migrants in the last four years, many of them from Haiti.

“All these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they’re hurting our city, and it was their words that did it,” the mayor, Rob Rue, told WSYX, a local news station in Ohio.

He told Margaret Brennan of CBS that he wants whoever made the threats to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. “But we don’t believe, Margaret, in a heckler’s veto in this country.” He added: “I think that we should ignore these ridiculous psychopaths who are threatening violence on a small Ohio town and focus on the fact that we have a vice president who’s not doing her job in protecting that small Ohio town.”

Mr. Vance called the question “more appropriate for a Democratic propagandist than it is for an American journalist” and denied that his and Mr. Trump’s words had any connection to the threats that immediately followed them.

The Ohio senator said in an interview with CNN that his evidence was based on the first-hand accounts of his neighbors. He said that the false story was being spread.

On Friday, Trump told reporters at a news conference in California that he would deport the Haitian migrants in Springfield — as well as in Aurora, Colo., which he said has been taken over by Venezuelan gangs; local Aurora police have said this is hyperbole.

“We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country,” the Republican presidential nominee said. We are going to start with Springfield and Aurora.

Following the recent influx of thousands of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine wants to send additional law enforcement and health care aid to the city.

“If you talk to people, particularly people who are working with the Haitians, what they’ll tell you is they’re very hard workers,” DeWine said. “We had one person who said that he would like to have 100 more working for him.” The people in Springfield are kind.