This. Is. Insane.

And it's by no means isolated. SUPERB REPORTING will make you want to scream.

Heartland Betrayed

By Benjamin Roberts · 28 September 2024

Down the Corruption Rabbit Hole: On the ground in Springfield, Ohio

“Springfield was in trouble before the Haitians came. With the fentanyl, drugs, and all that. Nobody wants to be in politics, nobody wants to sit there and listen to a business meeting, but the more they shut us down, the more they put us down, the more people are paying attention.”
— Barron, local biker-turned-pastor 

Springfield is the archetypal town of the forgotten man. Trump’s constant refrain has echoed throughout the rusted beams and derelict barns of this place. It has one problem: the wrong people remembered. And those people have come to finish Springfield off, once and for all.

I didn’t come in search of cats and dogs on grills, although I found that too. I came to learn why the political representative of the American people was determined to replace them with others. It turns out that the explanation is simple: they did it for money, for a feeling of moral superiority, and because it could be done.

My investigation discovered a long rotten beam extending from the Mayor down to NGOs, pastors, corporations, and local mediocrities looking to make a fast buck. Everyone is on the take. And Springfield is not an outlier. It is a standard example of local partnerships with federal and corporate resettlement programs working together to profit themselves.

The perverse incentive structures of these institutions makes them incapable of resisting population replacement. The citizens are simply not lucrative enough to leave alone. As things stand, nothing will stop without concerted intervention. The charities, churches, and city officials in Springfield are alien officials ruling over a subject population, robber-barons without charisma or mystique, fishing for pennies in the sewers they have made of their hometowns.

***

The Mayor

Springfield Mayor Rob Rue claims to be helpless against federal directives. He claims he’s done his best, talked to those who must be talked to, and heard the speakers at city hall. In truth, his hands are less clean. As well as serving as the mayor of Springfield, Rob Rue is the owner of Littleton Properties of Springfield LLC., which owns six rental properties in Springfield. Going door-to-door, I confirmed that at least four of these properties are rented to Haitian migrants. These tenants are not just nuclear families, but multi-generational households including anywhere from ten to fifteen people crammed into one half of a duplex. It is not clear who is paying their rent. Rue is supposedly concerned about the government sending migrants, and overwhelming his constituents’ services, but he is also making sure to profit from the situation.

Using the Clark County Auditor website, and searching ‘Littleton Properties of Springfield’, one can view Mayor Rue’s properties. His tenants didn’t speak English. When I interviewed them I had to translate into Creole.

At one point in my door-to-door investigation, a white man in a car began following me and honking incessantly in an attempt to drown out my recordings. As I ended my inquiries at Mayor Rue’s funeral home business, he threw a large metal object and yelled at me to come over. I kept walking. Was this man a member of Rue’s security detail, sent to discourage investigations?

Rue was clearly cagey about his rental properties being looked into, and no wonder. An elected official who promised to keep his people safe and defend their interests is directly profiting from the crisis it is his responsibility to solve. One resident told me, “He’s thrown his hands up. He’s a chicken shit.” She spoke of long lines for Medicaid and Social Security, not being able to get access to social services because of the “busloads” of Haitians being dropped in Springfield. Another woman was concerned that ‘helping the Haitians’ was unsustainable. How do you help 20,000 Haitians and not “implode the city?”  It’s “kind of sad it took a cat being abused rather than thousands of people being neglected and abused” to bring attention to Springfield.

***

City Hall & Police

The first night I spent in Springfield, City Hall hosted a public listening forum. Little did we know this would be the last one for a long time. City Hall was soon locked down, nominally because of bomb threats, which were later revealed to be hoaxes. 

Early in the evening, police barred new entrants into the forum. This occurred well before the session was adjourned, and local residents told me it was highly unusual. It was already clear that government officials were battening down the hatches and hiding from the people who pay their salaries. 

That same night, I had a brief conversation with Police Chief Allison Elliot. Elliot promised me an interview, but the interview was never granted. After repeated requests to conduct one in person, over the phone, or via email, I received no response, and after visiting the police station in person was funneled to “Strategic Engagement Officer” Karen Graves. This soon became every city employee’s refrain. City Manager Bryan Heck: Speak to the SEO. Human Resources Director Jim Bodenmiller: Speak to the SEO. The police officer guarding the City Hall elevator after lockdown: Speak to the SEO. Meanwhile, Graves ignored my calls, emails, and every other form of attempted communication for the whole week I was there. Combined with the fact that visitors were only allowed into City Hall by appointment following the lockdown but no one ever responded to grant an appointment, the effect was total stonewalling. 

Responding to the public forum and City Hall’s lockdown, a local woman said: “They’re scared of physical unrest and that shows how little they know their constituents… look at me, I’m not looking for a fight. I want them to govern for the concerns of citizens. I want a task force, and they have one, but it’s only for the Haitians.” Another resident expressed his frustration at being ignored and rebuffed. “My security camera kept going off at 3 AM in the morning, every morning. One night I saw three big transport vans full of Haitians just dropping them off in the middle of town. Why are they doing it in the dead of night if it’s on the up and up? Why can’t we get any answers? They’re saying we’re at 20,000 Haitians now, but I don’t buy that. We’re at 30-35,000, at least!” People who I spoke to weren’t expecting the Mayor or Manager to simply wave a magic wand and make the problem go away. But they wanted their representative to actually represent them, by speaking to the people above them, who they could not speak to, and bring them the answers that they could not get. 

***

Churches

And the local government may actually be the least compromised of all the bad actors operating in Springfield. The churches, entrusted to care for their neighbors, have decided to interpret this edict by siding with recent arrivals. 

An example is the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, a Catholic voluntary organization which issued a press release in response to citizen backlash against their role in the migrant crisis in which they acknowledged that “SVdP volunteers and interpreter[sic]/navigators assist these neighbors [migrants] with tools for independent living. SVdP conduct(s) legal pro-bono immigration clinics. Whenever possible, SVdP navigators help Haitians seek waivers of… application fees.”

Meanwhile a new epidemic of homelessness is emerging as a result of skyrocketing rents, rapacious landlord behavior, and general impoverishment. There are plenty of grandmothers in Springfield who could use a navigator at the DMV, and poor Americans who could use a fee waiver or pro-bono legal assistance, but SVdP has different priorities.

Although I was unable to make contact with Catholic Charities of Southwestern Ohio’s Springfield Office, they also state on their website that they cooperate with the federal government to resettle migrants and provide special services to them: “the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and their affiliates, are guided by the U.S. Department of State to provide resettlement services.” After looking into these kinds of resettlement partnerships in more detail, I uncovered a startling network. The intertwining of faith organizations and federal and local government is hidden in plain sight. Partnerships are publicized, and many are proud of the work that they do. 

An example is the Nehemiah Foundation, a non-profit organization that coordinates faith-based activities among churches and parishioners as an official partner of the City of Springfield. The Nehemiah Foundation also maintains collaborative relationships with the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, the Haitian Community Help & Support Center, and the Springfield City School District. While eavesdropping and taking notes, I overheard several Nehemiah volunteers discuss teaching English to Haitians. The bearded man pictured on Nehemiah’s Activities webpage was jovially conversing with several of his colleagues while waiting outside a public forum that would never reopen. He began by saying “four of us have taught English every Sunday this month”, and when one man replied, “I’ve got to work every Sunday this month”, he joked: “Well since you’re working for free, we’ll give you the month off!” 

Nehemiah’s volunteers have a level of ideological and religious conviction which means they are happy to educate Haitians for free. Admirable although this is, this is a level of concern for non-citizens which they do not extend to Americans. While teaching Haitians English, they also promote BLM-inspired Juneteenth activities and introduce them to DEI “anti-racist” ideological propaganda. For example, in a Nehemiah-promoted book, we find the following: 

“The focus and support of the mantra Black Lives Matter is legitimately born out of tragedy… the racial conflict in America rose to a whole new level with the very public murder of George Floyd. His death, brought about by a white police officer kneeling on his neck, was filmed on a cell phone for the world to see. Like fireworks exploding on the Fourth of July, this watershed event… was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back as black, white, and brown people took to the streets in protest.” 

The Nehemiah Foundation is teaching the Haitian arrivals that the country hates them and White people want to murder them at the same time that they teach them English. What type of citizens, and with what politics, will these Haitians turn out to be? 

Haiti itself, of course, under Jean-Jacques Dessalines, murdered every single White person on the island (including many who had no involvement in slavery) at the end of their revolt against the French. Dessalines’ secretary is recorded as saying: “We should have the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen!” Dessalines himself had no regrets: “I will go to my grave happy. Haiti has become a blood-red spot on the face of the globe!” Now the government and the Church are resettling Haitians in Springfield en masse and teaching them that white racism and anti-black hatred is an inexorable force which commands American public life.

A local Christian at a more orthodox church expressed it this way: “God is gonna get in and a bunch of stuff is gonna come in… the churches have to repent before God.”

***

NGOs & Education

Together with government and churches, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are another powerful player in the replacement migration game. What follows is part of the transcript of an interview I had with David Smiddy, Executive Director of Warder Literacy Center. After Mark Granza, my editor, managed to get in touch by presenting the magazine as a left-of-center outlet interested in defending the organization and its partners, I did the same and was able to meet and have a revelatory 15-minutes conversation with him (the full exchange, which I secretly recorded, can be listened here):

Benjamin: Has [the English teaching program] been a good positive program for you? Are you seeing people come out with better English skills?

David: You got a lot of questions. You just asked me about five…

Benjamin: I guess maybe to condense it: have you seen the new English language classes having success in the community? 

David: Oh yes, because we’ve been working with them since 2019. 

Benjamin: Oh?

David: So it wasn’t the big numbers then. But there are a lot of Spanish speakers in town. We have a lot of Portuguese from Brazil. We’ve got people from Ukraine that are here… We get people from Venezuela, Colombia, from Mexico, you know, from global places like that… 

We work with Catholic Social Services. Also, there’s a special class we have for them. But not everybody wants to learn English. Even when they’re here. There are at least 12 different organizations that are giving English classes in Clark County right now.

Benjamin: Why do you think you’ve flown under the radar? First Diversity, I know they’re getting blasted. Then Saint Vincent’s, I know they’ve gotten some heat, but they said that it wasn’t, like, catastrophic.

David: So we get money from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. We get referrals to St Vincent de Paul. You know, we do fundraising. We raise with foundations in town. United Way helped support us.

The history with Springfield in terms of the Haitians coming here is that there are a few people who are doing really well. Hey. I got to Springfield. I went into this job place. They hired me and I went to work the next day… And here I am down in Miami knocking on all these doors and I can’t even find a job. So where are you gonna go? Right? So you’re gonna come to Springfield. And then you’re gonna tell your friends and your family, and then First Diversity is getting it, because they actively have gone to places like Florida and Texas and sought out the Haitians to come up here to work. 

Benjamin: Really? I didn’t know that. 

David: Oh, yeah. And so, that they’re getting it, you know, because they’re like, you brought these people up here. You know? So people are mad.

The key revelation here is that First Diversity Staffing, contrary to the establishment media narrative of Haitians organically relocating to Springfield, is seeking out and shuttling in people from across the nation. Director Smiddy, with one sentence, blows apart the Regime’s attempts to wash its hands of Springfield’s Haitian migrant crisis. They are not organically traveling there, they are being funneled in by corporations, subsidized by the federal government, and inserted into a massive support and facilitation apparatus.

Warder Literacy Center, a partner with Saint Vincent de Paul, which also teaches Haitians English and anti-white ideology, offers the following information on flyers and their website:

“Naturalizing as a US citizen can seem daunting to anyone, but we’ve got you covered!  We have a specific learning curriculum to help you get prepared plus knowledgeable staff to guide you on the journey.  Also, we have tutors who can help you practice for the interview.”

From an SVdP flier hanging in the Warder Literacy Center:

“District Council of Springfield Society to St. Vincent de Paul: Provide regular program updates to SVdP Board and Trustees-Board/Trustees will request a monthly report with Haitian registration services data (i.e. Number of people served; specific services provided; monetary announce given; TPS, Asylum, Work permits, jobs, etc… include in-kind amounts given during walk-ins”

And from the SVdP missive reported above: 

“and to conduct legal pro-bono immigration clinics.”

Warder Literacy Center partner, United Way of Clark, Champagne, and Madison Counties, explicitly solicits donations for the Haitian community on their website:

“The Springfield Unity Fund allows people from near and far an opportunity to support the growing needs of Springfield’s immigrant population, particularly the Haitian community. A gift to the new, targeted fund supports Springfield’s nonprofits providing essential services to Haitian families throughout the community.”

What are the Haitians doing with this network of services? At least some of them are establishing fraudulent businesses and creating a false front of legitimacy with them. Consider Migueltio Jerome, the proprietor of: the New Diaspora School (NDS), Vini America, Ouest Haiti, and New Diaspora Live. Through his ‘Ouest Haiti’ venture, Jerome can be seen proudly displaying his long-term stay in Dubai, flaunting his trips to the Louis Vuitton store and the Burj Khalifa. You can purchase language courses on New Diaspora School’s still-active website, but their listed address, which has been shuttered since July, is an abandoned floor of offices strewn with beer bottles, toilet paper, trash, and old grimy rolls of NDS stickers. 

Vini America appears to be a fake immigration services law firm, with a renowned tax consultant named ‘Family Consultant’ leading the operation. The website is riddled with grammatical errors, repeated nonsensical paragraphs, and a fake roster of lawyers. As a partner of NDS, and with 28k Facebook followers, it seems Jerome simply starts fake businesses to grift and make a quick buck. He has a multitude of addresses and offices listed across his ‘business empire’, yet only one seems to function, or have ever functioned: New Diaspora Live. A radio station located in Springfield’s historic downtown district, New Diaspora Live appears to be almost exclusively a minority and migrant activist broadcaster. How does it benefit the American people to subsidize a fake businessman running an anti-American grievance podcasting grift?

The massive support apparatus which has been extended to Springfield funnels-in migrants, supplies them with housing, money, jobs, language classes, transportation, ideological education and indoctrination. The Nehemiah Foundation, New Diaspora School, Warder Literacy, St. Vincent de Paul, United Way, Catholic Charities of Southwestern Ohio, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, First Diversity Staffing, and City Hall, in partnership with the federal government and government-linked religious authorities, are priming Haitian migrants for citizenship as ready-made voters and activist foot soldiers of the Democratic Party.

***

First Diversity Staffing & George Ten

First Diversity Staffing (FDS), owned by George Ten, also the President, places Haitians in jobs. FDS is a temp and staffing agency which gained notoriety among locals for being the epicenter of the Haitian expansion in Springfield. It was FDS which placed Haitians in the factories of Ross McGregor, the business owner from this viral video disparaging American workers, and FDS who have been responsible for the vast majority of Haitian hiring across town. McGregor himself is widely distrusted in Springfield. According to the local motorcycle-pastor Barron: “he was one cane and whip from being massa.” 

First Diversity not only staffs the Haitians, but brings them from all over the country and slots them into the Ten ecosystem. The Tens run the shuttle service that charges $20 a head each way and ferries the Haitians they pulled into town to the jobs FDS placed them in, back to FDS headquarters, and eventually to one of over 48 rental properties acquired by Ten Enterprises LLC. Between 2021 and 2023, Ten Enterprises bought all 48 properties for approximately $2,665,040. Coincidentally, this was the exact time period during which the TPS program exploded under the Biden-Harris regime. 

I knocked on many of Ten’s doors and talked to the people living there. The majority were Haitians, crammed into tiny duplexes, but some were Latino migrants from Nicaragua or Venezuela, possibly resettled under the CHNV program. Few spoke any English. 

Import them, transport them, employ them, house them. Considerable money can be made from participating in resettlement and facilitation schemes for Haitian migrants, and the Tens seem to have reaped quite a bit of it. I attempted to meet with anyone working at First Diversity to hear their side of the story but I was stonewalled. Upon approaching their headquarters I was met by employees who sarcastically asked if I was there to apply. Ironically, the black metal gate which runs the length of their property had been partially damaged by a Haitian-caused car crash. When I asked them for a contact, they directed me to Britt Jensen, the Human Resources Director. I reached out for comment but my interview request was denied. 

George is not the only Ten involved in First Diversity’s empire. Miguel Ten is FDS’ Regional Human Resources Director and Senior Pastor at Life of Christ Community Church. Vilma Ten, his wife, is the ‘First Lady’ of the Church. The Tens have turned replacement migration into a lucrative enterprise that shows no signs of slowing down.

***

The Money

Tracking properties is easy, but tracking money is harder. If LLCs are not publicly traded, they don’t have to file accounts with the federal government. Some states require LLCs to file annual reports. Ohio does not. Thus, tracking how an LLC gets its funds and spends them is difficult. 

Even harder is tracking the disbursal of federal funds. Federal monies are disbursed through contracts, grants, direct payments, loans and other channels in which entities like the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services are pass-through bodies. Executive Director David Smiddy of the Warder Literacy Center admitted to being funded by this department, but more granular details are hard to determine. Within a labyrinth of organizations, obfuscation is the norm. Ohio Department of Development. Ohio Housing Finance Agency. Springfield Metropolitan Housing Authority. Minority Business Services. Neighborhood Impact Division… The names go on and on. Entities feed into other entities to create a twisted maze.  

Meanwhile, local citizens are left to bear the costs, including a massive spike in car accidents. Last year an unlicensed Haitian careened into a school bus, killing 11-year-old Aiden Clark and injuring 23 other children. Local bartender Jill explained she’s afraid to let her 17-year-old son drive: “It’s an American rite of passage, and I can barely afford it. I’m worried he’ll be killed by a Haitian every time he hits the road. Our premiums have skyrocketed.” All over Springfield, this is a common refrain. “All because you don’t want to learn how to drive, we have to die,” another local told me.

Meanwhile a local tow company owner is charting losses of $5,000 a month as a direct result of Haitian crashes. At first glance, one would imagine this to be a boon for his business. However, because Haitians are unlicensed, insurance does not pay out to the owner. Furthermore, almost none of the drivers return to salvage their vehicles, and as a result, due to regulations, tow company lots fill up. In the owner’s words: 

“We wait five to ten days start doing a BMV record search, send certified letters to every registrants and lien holder and certified owner, then wait 30-35 days, then we take it and scrap it for a couple hundred bucks, after waiting for forty days minimum, paying $40 for storage a day. Half of the 50 cars on the lot are from Haitian accidents. Our insurance has gone up almost $600 a month for three tow trucks – $800 to $1,400. I can’t claim the loss either, I am only allowed to show the income of the scrap regardless of all the associated costs and expenses. When we tow them off the road, they say, or some translator shows up and says, ‘we’ll let insurance deal with it’, knowing damn well they don’t have insurance! Two of the only Haitians to ever come by to pay had translators with them, and another’s first words in the door were ‘discount-discount-discount’. A couple times we’d done $1,200 of work before we even left the interstate, and they took off into the woods, just plain fled the scene. There’s nothing we can do.”

Almost all of the Haitians apparently drive Honda Odysseys. They all bank with PNC, many have cars licensed by Trust Auto, and the most common insurance provider is Acceptance. Who is facilitating this? Who is filing the paperwork and opening these accounts for a community that can’t speak English? So far, I have not been able to uncover much in that direction. It is too peculiar to be assumed to be a coincidence, however. 

***

Homelessness

The poorest in Springfield are suffering just as much as small business owners. The local homeless shelter, formerly an Executive Inn Motel, shut down before more than a third of the rooms became operational. Residents were given three hours to leave. Barron, the local pastor and centerpiece of homeless advocacy in town, insisted that “there’s 450 churches around here, there shouldn’t be a single orphan, hungry, or homeless.” According to him, the grant for the shelter was written upon having 70 operational rooms as an expectation, and only 22 ever functioned. “There’ll be no more homeless shelters after next month.” 

I interviewed a recently homeless woman, one of many who frequents the soup kitchen and a camp Barron services (comprised almost entirely of recent homeless driven out by rising rents), whose husband holds down a factory job. Her and her friends told me that locals are “pushed out to remodel, rents go from $800 to $1800, and then they move Haitians there.” Even the food lines aren’t safe. The Haitians, they say, push their way ahead of everyone else and take all of the food before anyone else can get it. The charitable service providers don’t seem to care. As I left their group, the woman called me back to pointedly remark: “We’ve been displaced as a part of the Haitian invasion.”

At a bar at the end of the day, the conversation turned to a rampant increase in sexual harassment and stalking at Haitian hang-outs like Walmart and grocery store parking lots. All of the women there said that they themselves, their daughters, their sisters, their nieces, and even their mothers or grandmothers had experienced Haitians following them through the aisles, to their cars, getting so close to them that their breath wafted across the back of their necks:

“It happened to me. You pass them in multiple aisles and they’re not holding anything, they’re not shopping, it’s clear they’re following you. There’s a group of four of them in the parking lot, and that’s creepy because they’re in the back of the lot, in the dark.”

***

Today the whole country now knows about Springfield, but Springfield is a microcosm of the rest of America. Local officials and government-connected businessmen are on the take. The churches and the NGOs are creating a new class of Democrat activist voters. City Hall is hiding from its own constituents. The people of Springfield have been standing up, by themselves, and for themselves, for a very long time. The country, now awake, is finally standing beside them. Is it already too late?

What’s stunning is how little of this information is hidden. The Byzantine financials might be hard to discern, but nearly everyone involved in Springfield’s migration crisis is proud to proclaim their involvement. The Ten Family’s First Diversity empire and the Mayor did attempt to keep their profiteering secret, and everyone took cover when the spotlight was finally shone on them. But before the rest of the country began looking more closely, their complete disregard for their own people was practically a badge of honor. 

Religious, local, business, and social elites feel no solidarity for American citizens. At best, they are an afterthought, and at worst they’re an enemy. Moral value is actually extracted from worsening their lot and blotting out their memory. But Americans are the last people who will lie down and accept this. The nation was born from rebellion and from the refusal to give up its sovereignty, and it will be reborn the same way.

Benjamin Roberts is an Associate Editor at IM—1776. He can be followed

Benjamin Roberts

.

Note from the Author: Special thanks to Elizabeth Roberts, @WarOnUgliness, and @MajorityHaitian for research assistance.