For small cities across Alabama with Haitian populations, Springfield is a cautionary tale

ENTERPRISE, Ala. — Transitioning from bustling Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to a small Alabama town at the southern tip of the Appalachian Mountains was a challenge for Sarah Jacques.

But over the course of a year, the 22-year-old settled in and settled in. Jacques got a job at a factory that makes car seats, found a Creole-speaking church and began to experience the ease and security of living in Albertville after the political unrest and violence that has ravaged her homeland.

But recently, when Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate started getting promoted debunked disinformation about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, where crime is created and “pets are eaten,” Jacques said there have been new, unforeseen challenges.

“When I first came here, people waved at us and said hello to us, but now it’s not the same,” Jacques said in Creole through a translator. “When people see you, they look at you as if they are very quiet with you or are afraid of you.”

Amid this rising tension, a bipartisan group of local religious leaders, law enforcement officials and Alabamians see the fallout in Springfield as a cautionary tale — and have taken steps to help the state’s Haitian population integrate into the small towns where they live live.

If political unrest and violence intensify in Haiti, Haitian migrants have embraced a program established by President Joe Biden in 2023 allowing the U.S. to accept and obtain work permits for up to 30,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela for two years. The Biden administration recently announced that the program will allow an estimated 300,000 Haitians to remain in the U.S. at least until February 2026.

There were 2,370 people of Haitian descent in Alabama in 2023, according to census data. There is no official count of the increase in the Haitian population in Alabama since the implementation of the program.

The immigration debate is not new to Albertville, where migrant populations have been growing for three decades, said Robin Lathan, executive assistant to Albertville’s mayor. Lathan said the city does not track how many Haitians have moved to the city in recent years, but said, “It appears there has been an increase especially in the last year.”

A representative of the Albertville school system said that last school year, 34% of the district’s 5,800 students learned English as a second language – compared to just 17% in 2017.

In August, weeks before Springfield made national headlines, a Facebook post of men getting off the bus to work at a poultry factory led some residents to speculate that the factory was hiring people living in the country illegally.

Representatives of the poultry plant said in an email to The Associated Press that all of its employees are legally allowed to work in the U.S.

The uproar culminated in a public meeting where some residents sought clarity on the federal program that allowed Haitians to work legally in Alabama, while others called on landlords to “close housing to Haitians” and suggested the migrants had a “smell have on them”. “, according to audio recordings.

For Unique Dunson, a 27-year-old lifelong Albertville resident and community activist, these feelings felt familiar.

“Every time Albertville gets a new influx of people who are not white, there seems to be a problem,” Dunson said.

Dunson runs a store that offers free items to the community. After tensions ran high across the country, she placed several billboards around the city saying ‘welcome neighbor, glad you came’.

Dunston said the billboards are a way to “push back” against the idea that migrants are not welcome.

When Pastor John Pierre-Charles first arrived in Albertville in 2006, he said the only other Haitians he knew in the area were his relatives.

In fourteen years, the congregation of his Creole-language church, Eglise Porte Etroite, has grown from just seven members in 2010 to about 300 congregants. He is now adding classrooms to the church building for English language classes and driving lessons, as well as a podcast studio to accommodate the growing community.

Yet Pierre-Charles describes the past few months as “the worst period” for the Haitian community in all his time in Albertville.

“I see some people in Albertville who are really scared right now because they don’t know what’s going to happen,” Pierre-Charles said. “Some are afraid because they think they might be sent back to Haiti. But some of them are afraid because they don’t know how people will react to them.”

Following the fallout from the first public meetings in August, Pierre-Charles sent a letter to city leadership calling for more funding for housing and food to ensure his growing community could safely acclimatize, both economically and culturally.

“That’s what I try to do: be a bridge,” Pierre-Charles said.

He doesn’t work alone.

In August, Gerilynn Hanson, 54, helped organize the first meetings in Albertville, saying many residents had legitimate questions about the impact of migration on the city.

Now Hanson says she is adjusting her strategy, “focusing on the human level.”

In September, Hanson, an electric utility company and Trump supporter, formed a nonprofit with Pierre-Charles and other Haitian community leaders to provide more stable housing and English language classes to meet growing demand.

“We can look at (Springfield) and become them in a year,” Hanson said, referring to the animosity that has developed in the Ohio city. inundated with threats. “We can sit back and do nothing and let it happen in front of our eyes. Or we can try to counteract some of that and get to a place where everyone is productive and can talk to each other.”

Similar debates have spread at public meetings across the state – even in places where Haitians make up less than 0.5% of the entire population.

In Sylacauga, videos from numerous public gatherings show residents questioning the impact of the alleged increase in the number of Haitian migrants. Officials said there are only 60 Haitian migrants in the city of about 12,000 southeast of Birmingham.

In Enterprise, not far from the Alabama-Florida border, cars lined the parking lot of Open Door Baptist Church in September for an event that promised answers about how the growing Haitian population is impacting the city.

After the event, James Wright, the chief of the Ma-Chis Lower Creek Indian Tribe, was sympathetic to the reasons why Haitians fled their homes, but said he worried that migrants would undermine local “political culture” and “community values” would affect Enterprise.

Other attendees echoed fears and misinformation that Haitian migrants are “lawless” and “dangerous.”

But some came to try to address growing concerns about the migrant community.

Enterprise Police Chief Michael Moore said he shared statistics from his department that show no measurable increase in crimes as Haiti’s population grows.

“I think there were quite a few people who were more concerned about the fear mongering than about the migrants,” Moore told the AP.

Moore said his department had received reports of Haitian migrants living in homes that violated city code, but when he contacted the people in question, the issues were quickly resolved. Since then, his department has not heard any credible complaints about crimes caused by migrants.

“I completely understand that some people may not like what I say because it doesn’t fit their own personal thought process,” Moore said. “But those are the facts.”

___

Riddle is a staff member of The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.