The death of Pierre Damas Bel last week bore the hallmarks of an American tragedy. He was a “joyful” 20-year-old, according to the pastor at his church in Springfield, Ohio; a star on his high-school soccer team who planned to attend nearby Wittenberg University on a scholarship; and a “natural leader,” according to one of his JROTC instructors. Bel’s decision, according to his family, to walk into traffic on Interstate 70 and die by suicide hinted at some unfathomable inner turmoil. He seemed on paper like the kind of golden boy whose death stirs whispers of disbelief: Where did things go wrong?

But the answer was obvious. Bel was a Haitian immigrant, and prior to his death, some of the wealthiest and most powerful forces in the country had spent months recruiting people from all levels of society — from federal bureaucrats to Bel’s own classmates — to degrade the lives of people like him.

They cast Bel and his neighbors as barbarians in coordinated blitzes online and schemed in private how to expel them through legal means. By the time President Donald Trump ended Temporary Protected Status for Haitians in June, the president and his allies had spent years desensitizing the public to the repercussions of their actions. Bel’s fate cannot be interpreted as one promising life gone awry. It was the product of a deliberate campaign.

Bel moved to the U.S. at 18, joining his parents and roughly 330,000 of their countrymen who were granted TPS by the Department of Homeland Security. Under this designation — first applied to Haiti by the Obama administration after the 2010 earthquakes and renewed at least seven times since — at least 12,000 Haitian immigrants established homes in Springfield. Then Donald Trump ran for reelection. In 2024, vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance amplified a conspiracy theory that Springfield’s Haitians were kidnapping their neighbors’ pets and eating them. When challenged on this lie by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Vance claimed it did not particularly matter........

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