Deep Reads: Cracks in the dream
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 August 2025
⏱️ 25 minutes
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Summary
The Vitals had settled in Springfield from Haiti during President Donald Trump’s first term and saved money through the Biden administration. Business leaders in their reliably red county praised immigrants for reviving the local economy. Americans struggled to pass drug tests, one factory boss told a TV news crew. Not Haitians.
Fernande Vital earned $21 an hour at a Japanese automotive plant, monitoring robots forging car parts, while her husband, Rocher, led a strip-mall church. Even as the GOP and some of their neighbors called for mass deportations, the Vitals were sure nobody meant them, immigrants here legally.
So inJuly of last year, they made a down payment of $8,000, their entire nest egg. In August, they moved in, installed lace curtains and hung a family portrait in the dining room. One month later came the cracks.
Danielle Paquette reported, wrote and narrated the piece. Bishop Sand composed music and produced audio.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, I'm Cole Bierkowitz. This is Post Reports weekend. It's Saturday, August 2nd. |
| 0:05.8 | You're going to hear today a story about a Haitian family in Springfield, Ohio. It's from my colleague |
| 0:11.1 | Danielle Pickett, a national correspondent for The Post. Danielle will be narrating the story, |
| 0:16.4 | and you'll hear some actual audio of people Danielle spoke with, where that's possible, instead of hearing Danielle reading their quotes. |
| 0:24.0 | This reporting is part of a Washington Post series called Deepreads. The idea is to showcase our narrative journalism. |
| 0:31.1 | We start now with Danielle, who describes how she came to this story. |
| 0:35.9 | I'd been visiting Springfield since last September, |
| 0:39.9 | right after that debate, right after that scorching national spotlight landed on this pretty |
| 0:46.6 | small Ohio city. And I'd noticed over time that people were really scared to speak or share anything about their lives. |
| 0:57.5 | I was totally stunned when I met this pastor and his family. |
| 1:02.7 | I was there to talk to them about the immigration situation. |
| 1:06.6 | You know, they were there under temporary protected status. |
| 1:09.8 | They'd always assumed they had decades left. That status has been in place for 15 years now since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. So they had no reason to believe they told me that they could be just ousted at any minute. And even as the rhetoric got really fiery toward the end of the election, |
| 1:29.6 | and Trump and Republicans and their own neighbors were calling for mass deportations, they thought, |
| 1:35.1 | this family thought to themselves, well, I'm here legally, don't have a criminal record. I'm a pastor |
| 1:40.2 | at a church I opened. My wife works at an auto factory in a city with a labor shortage. We're |
| 1:47.8 | pretty safe. So they decide to spend all of their money on this house that begins to showcase |
| 1:54.6 | these really disturbing cracks the same month as that presidential debate in which Donald Trump starts repeating that Haitians in their city, Springfield, Ohio, are eating the dogs or eating the cats. |
| 2:09.2 | And that struck me as just so overwhelming. How do you navigate that? So that drew me to them. How are they going to make this happen? |
| 2:17.7 | I didn't want to just write it all in one weekend. |
| 2:19.6 | I stuck with them from November until May, watching that whole arc unfold. |
| 2:29.3 | It's really about, is my house about to collapse? |
... |
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