In his September 10 debate with Kamala Harris, Donald Trump repeated a charge raised by his campaign and his running mate, J.D. Vance, a week before. Millions watching the debate heard it and it reverberated around the world.

Trump said “illegal” Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating people’s dogs and cats. He and Vance and their campaign have continued to repeat this absurd and false assertion, that had been on ultra-right internet sites for some time.

Rob Rue, the mayor of Springfield derided the charge. The Haitians in Springfield all have legal work permits and have been a major part of the city’s economy.

But Trump’s charges, repeated and amplified on the internet by white racists that are his base, have resulted in bomb and other violent threats against the Springfield Haitians, striking fear.

Threats against Haitians have extended to other cities and Haitians throughout the country are frightened and on guard.

Trump’s singling out Haitians is not new. When he was president, Trump in 2017, his first year in office, said that immigrants from Haiti should not be let into the United States because they “all have AIDS.” He told Sean Hannity on Fox News on October 7, 2021, “We have hundreds of thousands of people flowing in from Haiti. Haiti has a tremendous AIDS problem. Many of those people will probably have AIDS, and they’re coming into our country.”

Trump has especially picked out Haitians because they are Black, which in his eyes is even worse than the largely brown people from Central America. Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans and other nationalities have massed at the southern border seeking asylum, with many illegally crossing because the official asylum system is slow and refuses many legal entry.

What to do with these people is the main issue confronting both candidates.

Harris’s position is that she will reintroduce a Senate bill informally known as the bipartisan immigration bill (actually a part of the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act) introduced early this year. It was blocked by Republicans when Trump opposed it.

Senate Republicans initially wrote the bill, and Democrats then negotiated with them to amend it. Senate leader Charles Schumer was in on the negotiations, and President Biden was consulted.

Harris’s bipartisan bill proposes an overhaul of the immigration system, amounting to a crackdown on the southern border. Both parties say there is a “crisis” at the border, with large numbers of people seeking asylum from violence, poverty, and other oppressive conditions. Both parties seek to allow in only a very few.

The Bill establishes a low threshold for the president to shut down the border, namely if over 5,000 migrants illegally crossing are caught in a day by authorities or if he determined national security required it.

On most days over that number are apprehended and Harris wants new funds for hiring hundreds of additional Border Patrol agents to capture more.

The Bill would also create a new system for asylum cases, which are to be moved to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). No longer would these cases be heard by immigration judges under the Department of Justice. Instead, the people hearing these cases would be officers with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency under the DHS. The idea here is that it is much faster review, without attorneys or a deliberative process.

The Bill’s authors believe this change would result in the vast majority of applicants being rejected.

Trump’s plans are vaguer, little more than promises geared for his base.

What Trump says he will do on the “first day” when he takes office would be to order all immigrants in the country without papers to be deported. He doesn’t say how he will do this. Is he dreaming of a vast police and army force going door to door, searching homes?

He also says he will shut the border down but proposes no plan for doing it. Harris has a plan in the “bipartisan immigration bill”. If elected, Trump and Congress would have to come up with something similar or face chaos at the frontier.

Both have basically the same proposal to crack down on immigration, including presidential authority to seal the border.