Donald Trump has already found a new town to harass with racist claims that immigrants have overrun it, and it’s in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
At a rally in Tucson, Arizona, last week, Trump railed about immigrants in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, which he said had “experienced a 2,000 percent increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris.”
“So Pennsylvania, remember this when you have to go to vote,” Trump said.
“It’s a small town, all of a sudden they got thousands of people!” he continued. “The schools are scrambling to hire translators for the influx of students who don’t speak not a word of English, costing local taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
The former president also claimed that the town had been rendered “virtually bankrupt” and that the increased immigrant population had led to an increase in crime.
Like with Springfield, local officials have had to come forward to combat the former president’s fearmongering. The borough manager of Charleroi, Joe Manning, told The Philadelphia Inquirer that many of the president’s claims about the town were blatantly untrue.
Manning said that the town’s Haitian residents were “not the burden on the local government or any of our resources or anything that’s being portrayed.”
“It’s no different than, you know, people moved to here from Tucson, Arizona, you’d have to deal with it,” Manning said.
While Charleroi’s population had increased by 2,000 percent as a result of immigration, that number was relative, Manning explained, because the town’s population had been so small. Charleroi had a population of 4,324 in 2022, according to the most recent census estimates.
Charleroi Area School District Superintendent Ed Zelich said that immigrant students were “not necessarily” costing taxpayers “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” as Trump had claimed. As enrollment rose, so did the reimbursement from the state’s Department of Education, he explained—but the new classmates didn’t present that much of a strain.
“We have that in place. We have teachers in place,” Zelich told the Inquirer. “There was a language barrier at first for the younger students when they come, but it’s not insurmountable.”
“I just want to say there’s a cost associated with all parts of education,” Zelich added. “But these students are blending into classrooms.”
Charleroi Borough President Kristin R. Hopkins released a statement on behalf of the borough, expressing “deep concern” over Trump’s comments about the town.
“Trump chose to exploit our town for political purposes, using divisive rhetoric to unfairly target the Haitian immigrant community,” Hopkins wrote.
“Rather than acknowledging the real economic issues the town is facing, some have chosen to unfairly target the Haitian community, judging the entire group based on misinformation and fear of outsiders.”
Hopkins’s statement sparked considerable backlash from the Republican Party of Washington County and City Council Member Larry Celaschi, who said he had not signed off on the statement.
Celaschi told right-wing propaganda site Breitbart News that the town’s budget was “suffering.”
“The impact of the immigrants has affected our school district tremendously, and so from the borough standpoint, it’s impacted our budget to where and the school districts. We weren’t prepared for any of this. We did not get any help from the federal government or the state government,” he said.
The Haitian immigrants whom Trump has chosen to deride are in the United States legally under Temporary Protected Status. They pay taxes, own property, and work. Now Trump is counting on his attacks against a vulnerable group to persuade voters in swing states to support him.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced Monday that the state would implement additional Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers in Springfield schools to conduct daily sweeps amid the mounting bomb threats against government buildings, schools, and hospitals.
J.D. Vance said Monday that to even suggest that the Republican ticket’s anti-immigrant rhetoric was responsible for inciting the bomb threats was “disgusting.”
