Two schools in Springfield were evacuated Friday after the Ohio city was bombarded with threats over the Haitian migrant crisis.
According to the Springfield City School District, students at Perrin Woods Elementary School and Snowhill Elementary School were evacuated from the building Friday morning and transferred to an “alternate location within the district.”
Students are now being released and placed in the care of their parents, The Columbus Shipment reported.
The schools were evacuated after police received information. What information police received that led to this alert is currently unknown.
Several other schools have also been evacuated since yesterday after the city gained notoriety over claims that Haitian migrants eat cats.
It is unclear whether the threats against the schools are related to the heated migrant debate in the city.
Students at Perrin Woods Elementary School and Snowhill Elementary School (pictured) were evicted from the building Friday morning and moved to an “alternate district location,” according to the Springfield City School District
Students are now being released back into the care of their parents. The schools were evacuated after police received information. What information police received that led to this alert is unknown at this time.
Yesterday, Fulton Elementary School was evacuated and Roosevelt Middle School was closed before the school day even started, due to the same information that prompted the closure of Perrin Woods and Snowhill, The Dispatch reported.
However, according to the district, no other schools were threatened.
City Hall was evacuated after multiple municipal facilities received bomb threats, The Dispatch reported. Every building in Clark County was also closed out of an “abundance of caution.”
The bomb threat, received by USA Today, was sent to multiple agencies via email around 8:30 a.m. Thursday morning. It said a bomb would explode in the building within hours and cited debunked rumors about Haitian migrants.
“My hometown of Springfield has become a third world city (expletive) because you allowed the federal government to dump this (expletive) here,” the email reads.
“We have Haitians eating our animals and then you lie and say this is not happening when we see this happening. I am here to send a message, I have placed a bomb in the following locations…”
The city of Springfield has been a bone of contention in the immigration debate since Haitian migrants began arriving en masse in 2020 to fill job vacancies.
A Springfield resident (pictured) claimed that Haitian migrants were beheading and eating ducks in public parks
The Haitians, who were already legally resident in the country, were willing to do the manual labor work that the locals were not so enthusiastic about and moved to the city.
Within a few years, 20,000 immigrants arrived, increasing Springfield’s population to just 58,000 in 2020.
The Haitians had social security numbers and work permits, paid taxes and lived in empty, boarded-up homes as the city shrank.
According to an immigration FAQ page on the city’s website, the immigrants are legally resident in Clark County and are eligible to apply for Temporary Protected Status. It estimates the total number of immigrants in Clark County to be between 12,000 and 15,000.
Erika Lee, 35, started a rumor on Facebook that migrants were eating cats. The message eventually ended up with Donald Trump’s campaign.
Lee admitted to NewsGuard that she heard the rumor about Haitian migrants eating cats in her town from her neighbor Kimberly Newton, who heard it from a friend, who heard it from the alleged cat owner.