“‘We spend our days in silence’: fear and repression in Ohio as ICE terrorizes Haitian immigrants”, 1 November 2026 (Photo via The Guardian — the original report)
As it ran on the front
Nine weeks ago, Pierre Damas Bel was a twenty-year-old student in Ohio. The Ohio State Highway Patrol put out a press release. Four days later, on September 5th, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin stood at a roundtable in Cincinnati and announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested 380 Haitian citizens in Springfield, the same termination of protected status that had cost Bel his standing now clearing the way for the removals. Washington has not issued a second number since.
It did not need to. One count was enough to do the rest of the work on its own.…
…(cont) Nine weeks after Bel's death, the Guardian found what 380 arrests buys a town once the cameras move on: silence. Haitian residents in Springfield told the paper they spend their days indoors, afraid to leave their own homes, the crackdown continuing with no further announcement, no further count, no further roundtable. The number did its work once; it has not needed to be repeated.
On the day the Guardian's report ran, dozens of Haitian activists were 23 miles into a 45-mile walk from Springfield to the Ohio statehouse in Columbus. Michaelle Louis, one of them, could barely stand on her own feet by that point in the march.
That is the whole mechanism of this kind of enforcement: announce the number loud enough once, then let the silence do the rest for free. No second headline is required. A town stops leaving its houses, and the only sound left is footsteps on a highway shoulder, headed toward a building where someone could still write a different number down.
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“They put out one number — 380 — and let fear do nine weeks of unpaid overtime after that. Nobody has to announce a second raid when the first one already taught a whole town to stay inside; silence is cheaper than a press conference and does the same job. That's the con: the count buys the headline, the quiet buys the compliance, and it never has to show up on a budget line.”
“Look, 380 arrests is enforcement doing exactly what the law says it should do — the program ended, the status ended, that's not a crackdown, that's a calendar. As for the community staying home, that's — well, that's their choice, nobody's required to — did I say "nobody's required to"? That's not landing the way I want it to.”
Haitian community in Springfield demands dignity and better rights for immigrants as ICE crackdown ramps up Michaelle Louis’s feet and legs are aching. She can barely walk. Surrounded by corn fields and the distant hum of a busy highway, the native of Haiti and dozens of other activists are 23 miles into a 45-mile march from Springfield…
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This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
