The Haitian Bridge Alliance is a US nonprofit working on behalf of Haitian and other black immigrants to the United States. They have offices in San Diego, CA and Tijuana, Mexico. It was founded by Pethou Archange and Guerline M. Jozef. [1] Ms Jozef is the current director.
In 2022, the Alliance sought to end Title 42, a US policy that, during a health emergency, "allows border officials to expel migrants back to Mexico or their home countries without offering them the opportunity to be screened for asylum eligibility." [2] The policy has since been terminated due to the end of the COVID-19 emergency.
The Alliance has also created a fund to pay the bond of black migrants, such as Haitians, who are in immigration detention. [2] They have also covered the costs of funerals for Haitians that have died at the US-Mexico border. [1]
In 2021, the Alliance won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights award for their work with migrants at the US-Mexico border. [2]
In September 2024, the executive director of the Alliance filed a bench memorandum and affidavit at the Clark County Ohio Municipal Court, alleging that presidential candidate Donald Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance had committed multiple crimes by promoting the false Springfield, Ohio, cat-eating hoax, where the candidates claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH had been eating neighbors pets. The bench memorandum asserts that this resulted in "disrupting public services (e.g., bomb threats), making false alarms, two counts of complicity, two counts of telecommunications harassment and aggravated menacing", and asked the court to issue arrest warrants for the candidates. [3] [4] [5] On October 4, the case was decided with an order for its matters to be "referred to the Clark County Prosecuting Attorney for further investigation and determination whether any prosecution is warranted." [6]
Springfield is a city in and the county seat of Clark County, Ohio, United States. The municipality is located in southwestern Ohio and is situated on the Mad River, Buck Creek, and Beaver Creek, about 45 miles (72 km) west of Columbus and 25 miles (40 km) northeast of Dayton. As of the 2020 census, the city had a total population of 58,662, while the Springfield metropolitan area had a population of 136,001 residents.
The international border separating Mexico and the United States extends from the Pacific Ocean in the west to the Gulf of Mexico in the east. The border traverses a variety of terrains, ranging from urban areas to deserts. It is the most frequently crossed border in the world with approximately 350 million documented crossings annually. Illegal crossing of the border to enter the United States has caused the Mexico–United States border crisis. It is one of two international borders that the United States has, the other being the northern Canada–United States border; Mexico has two other borders: with Belize and with Guatemala.
Haitian Americans are a group of Americans of full or partial Haitian origin or descent. The largest proportion of Haitians in the United States live in Little Haiti to the South Florida area. In addition, they have settled in major Northeast cities such as New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and in Chicago and Detroit in the Midwest. Most are immigrants or their descendants from the mid-late 20th-century migrations to the United States. Haitian Americans represent the largest group within the Haitian diaspora.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is a 2016 memoir by the current Vice President of the United States JD Vance about the Appalachian values of his family from Kentucky and the socioeconomic problems of his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, where his mother's parents moved when they were young. It was adapted into the 2020 film Hillbilly Elegy, directed by Ron Howard and starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams. Vance would later be elected and serve as a Senator of Ohio in 2022, and as Vice President of the United States after the 2024 U.S. Presidential election.
James David Vance is an American politician, author, attorney, and Marine Corps veteran serving as the 50th vice president of the United States since 2025 under President Donald Trump. A member of the Republican Party, he represented Ohio in the U.S. Senate from 2023 until his resignation in 2025.
Central American migrant caravans, also known as the Viacrucis del migrante, are migrant caravans that travel from Central America to the Mexico–United States border to demand asylum in the United States. The largest and best known of these were organized by Pueblo Sin Fronteras that set off during Holy Week in early 2017 and 2018 from the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA), but such caravans of migrants began arriving several years earlier, and other unrelated caravans continued to arrive into late 2018.
Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 5, 2024. The Republican Party's ticket—Donald Trump, who was the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021, and JD Vance, the junior U.S. senator from Ohio—defeated the Democratic Party's ticket—Kamala Harris, the incumbent vice president, and Tim Walz, the 41st governor of Minnesota. Trump and Vance were inaugurated as the 47th president and the 50th vice president, respectively, on January 20, 2025.
The 2024 United States Senate election in Ohio was held on November 5, 2024, to elect a member of the United States Senate to represent the state of Ohio. Incumbent Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown lost re-election to a fourth term, being defeated by Republican nominee Bernie Moreno. Along with Bob Casey Jr. in Pennsylvania and Jon Tester in Montana, Brown was one of three incumbent Senators to lose re-election in 2024. Primary elections took place on March 19, 2024.
The 2022 United States Senate election in Ohio was held on November 8, 2022, to elect a member of the United States Senate to represent the State of Ohio. Republican writer and venture capitalist JD Vance defeated Democratic U.S. Representative Tim Ryan to succeed retiring incumbent Republican Rob Portman.
Donald Trump, who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021, announced his campaign for the 2024 U.S. presidential election on November 15, 2022. After he won a landslide victory in the 2024 Iowa Republican presidential caucuses, Trump was generally described as being the Republican Party's presumptive nominee. He was officially nominated on July 15, 2024, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, when he also announced JD Vance, a junior U.S. Senator from Ohio, as the nominee for vice president. The two initially faced off against the presumptive Democraic Party ticket of incumbent President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. However, on July 21, 2024, Biden withdrew from the race, and Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate.
The immigration policy Joe Biden initially focused on reversing many of the immigration policies of the previous Trump administration, before implementing stricter enforcement mechanisms later in his term.
The 2024 United States presidential election in Ohio was held on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, as part of the 2024 United States presidential election in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia participated. Ohio voters chose electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote. Ohio had 17 electoral votes in the Electoral College, following reapportionment due to the 2020 United States census in which the state lost a seat.
The 2028 United States Senate elections will be held on November 7, 2028, with 34 of the 100 seats in the Senate being contested in regular elections, the winners of which will serve 6-year terms in the United States Congress from January 3, 2029, to January 3, 2035. Senators are divided into 3 groups or classes whose terms are staggered so that a different class is elected every 2 years. Class 3 senators were last elected in 2022, and will be up for election again in 2028. These elections will run concurrently with the 2028 United States presidential election.
The 2024 United States presidential debates were a series of debates held during the 2024 presidential election. Three debates in total were held during the election season. The first general election debate between the major candidates was sponsored by CNN and attended by then-presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump on June 27, 2024. Biden was widely considered to have performed poorly during the first debate, with many commentators and Democrats calling for him to drop out of the race. He withdrew his bid for re-election on July 21. A second debate, sponsored by ABC, was held on September 10 between Trump and Kamala Harris; it was widely reported that Harris won. A vice presidential debate, which was sponsored by CBS, was held on October 1.
The 50th vice president of the United States, JD Vance, has been described as national conservative, right-wing populist, and an ideological successor to paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan. Vance describes himself, and has been described by others, as a member of the postliberal right. He is known for his ties to Silicon Valley. Vance has said he is "plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures" online. He has endorsed books by Heritage Foundation leader Kevin Roberts and far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec.
Starting in September 2024, baseless hoaxes spread online saying Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. The claims began with a local Facebook group post claiming a local cat had been butchered, and spread quickly among far-right and neo-Nazi groups. The claims were then amplified by prominent figures in the American right, most notably Republican senator and vice-presidential nominee JD Vance of Ohio, followed by his running mate Donald Trump and allies such as Laura Loomer and Twitter owner Elon Musk. Subsequently, the author of the original Facebook post and the neighbor who told her the story admitted it was based on a rumor from people with whom they had not spoken.
On the morning of August 22, 2023, a school bus in Clark County, Ohio overturned off the side of the road, after being struck by a passenger van that crossed the centerline. One student died as a result of the collision, and 26 others were injured.
Sanewashing is the act of minimizing the perceived radical aspects of a person or idea in order to make them appear more acceptable to a wider audience. The term was initially coined in online discussions about defunding the police in 2020, but has come to greater prominence in critique of media practices relating to Donald Trump in the 2024 United States presidential election. Journalism organizations and media commentators have suggested actions both readers and writers can take to mitigate sanewashing.
The United States Senate career of JD Vance began on January 3, 2023, and ended on January 10, 2025. A member of the Republican Party from the state of Ohio, Vance previously served in the United States Marine Corps from 2003 to 2007. He resigned his seat in the U.S. Senate upon being elected Vice President of the United States.
Guerline Jozef is an activist. She is a co-founder and the executive director of the nonprofit Haitian Bridge Alliance.