A racist lie about Haitian immigrants, spread by former president Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, is now disseminating widely through memes on X.
In an email blast sent out Monday, the Trump campaign claimed that 20,000 Haitian immigrants had taken over Springfield, Ohio, where they were “decapitating ducks” and “kidnapping residents’ pets.” The story has already been debunked: It originated with a one-off arrest that was picked up and amplified by MAGA influencers. And yet, X is covered in AI-generated images of Trump saving kittens and ducks; X owner Elon Musk even shared an image.
The conspiracy theory traces back to the arrest of Allexis Telia Ferrell, who allegedly killed and ate a cat. Notably, Ferrell, not an illegal immigrant, much less of Haitian background; the originating Fox News story makes no mentions of these facts. (The incident didn’t even take place in Springfield, but rather in Canton, more than 150 miles away.) From there, the timeline of the lie gets murky: Mediaite traces the claim back to the MAGA influencer Ian Miles Cheong who posted the arrest video on X and claimed that she was Haitian. Spread between X users, the lie snowballed.
Eventually, the story made its way to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, which parroted it out in an email blast. That same day, Vance joined the chorus, writing on X, “People have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”
Images of kittens and ducks—many of them generated using AI—have since spread rapidly across X. There’s Trump kissing a duck; Trump holding a duck and a cat and appearing to run them away from a barbecue; Trump riding an elephant-size cat; even cats and ducks wearing red MAGA hats.
The memes have even made it to the upper echelon of the Republican party. Texas Senator Ted Cruz posted a photo of two cats hugging each other, with the message, “Please vote for Trump so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.” Elon Musk posted an image of the pets with a glib, “Save them!”
After Musk’s acquisition of X in October 2022, many feared that the app would turn into an alt-right message board. Today’s meme-sharing events prove, once again, that those fears are coming to fruition. It’s not just this latest incident: Musk gave Trump a softball interview on the platform in August, and far-right conspiracy theories have routinely flooded the app (most notably after the Trump assassination attempt in July). Now, a new racist conspiracy has found a home with Elon Musk’s social media company.