Two days after Donald Trump claimed Haitian migrants were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, the former president turned his attention to another part of America.

"A small, 4,000-person town of Charleroi, Pennsylvania – have you heard of it?" Trump asked the crowd at a campaign rally in Arizona.

"Charleroi – a beautiful name, but it's not so beautiful now," he said, blaming a "flood" of Haitian migrants for "bringing massive crime to the town" and sending it "virtually bankrupt".

In recent weeks, Trump has been dialling up the rhetoric about "illegal aliens" and "migrant crime" and promoting his promised "mass deportation" program. He says his plan will help "every town that has been invaded and conquered" by migrants who entered the US without authorisation.


But Charleroi's local council manager, Joe Manning, says Trump's claims about Haitians in his town are untrue.

"Everybody that's here, to our knowledge, is here legally," he said. "There was no spike in crime [and] we're not even close to being bankrupt."

Regardless, the comments had inflamed local tensions and emboldened white supremacists, he said.

Large stickers promoting a white nationalist group started to appear on traffic signal boxes downtown, and a flyer purportedly from the Ku Klux Klan began circulating on social media, encouraging "white citizens of Charleroi" to "take up arms".

"It started to scare the hell out of everybody," Mr Manning said.

"You felt frightened for the Haitians that were here, because they're not bothering anybody."


From 'Magic City' to ghost town

Charleroi was once such a boom town, it was nicknamed "Magic City".

But most of the factories and steel mills that powered the local economy have now closed, helping to push out two-thirds of the population over the course of a century. One of the largest remaining employers, a glass manufacturer, is leaving Charleroi and taking hundreds of jobs with it.

In recent years, about 700 Haitian migrants have moved into the town.

They include Evency Dorzelma, a former Haitian police officer who fled the country's gang violence six years ago. When he first arrived in Charleroi, he found a "ghost town with hundreds of empty houses", he said.

"What we brought to this city is really significant," Mr Dorzelma, who now works as a driver, said. Haitians and other migrants "are filling jobs that most Americans would never do" and revitalising the economy.

Some have opened stores in formerly dilapidated downtown buildings. Some are working in aged care. Many others work at a food-packaging plant, where the company president told local TV he had struggled to find American workers.

"I'm wondering if the former president realises how valuable the support we bring to this community is," Mr Dorzelma said.

He fears Trump's rhetoric is dangerous to Haitians and other people of colour.

"I know a lot of Black Americans around here who are business owners, so we imagine, if this doesn't stop, anyone can get hurt," he said.


Signs of division

As with most things in America, residents in Charleroi are divided on the immigration issue, and what Trump has said about it. But in the town's front yards, Trump-Vance signs appear to be much more popular than those for the Harris-Walz ticket.

Most of the locals who spoke to the ABC did not want to be identified in this story. "There's just too much hate going on," one said.

But they frequently raised two complaints.

One was that the influx of new arrivals had resulted in problems for local schools, with too few translators and teachers to cope. The other was that misunderstandings about road rules and dangerous driving had led to frequent car accidents and near misses.

Local officials concede there are challenges, but push back on both complaints.

While the school district has had to hire English teachers to help 225 non-native speakers (up from 12 just five years ago), superintendent Ed Zelich insists it isn't struggling.

And Mr Manning, the council manager, said traffic data showed accidents had decreased in recent years.

"They're not any greater, or any more severe, because Haitians came here," he said.

Conservative social media accounts have amplified another theory: that "Kamala has imported" Haitians to provide cheap labour for the local food-packaging plant.

A Republican state senator, Camera Bartolotta, responded online to say that was untrue and the plant's owner had been "vilified wrongly". "He advertised and looked for workers for a long time," she wrote on X. "Before shutting down completely, he hired an agency that connected immigrants who were vetted and LEGAL to work in his facility."



Last week, however, local media reported an agency that provides staff for the plant has been accused by federal investigators of recruiting undocumented migrants and paying them with cash.

The food-packaging company, Fourth Street Foods, did not respond to an inquiry from the ABC, but owner Dave Barbe told a local TV station his contracts with labour agencies require they only hire migrants with legal status.


Support for Trump's approach

Opinion polls suggest Trump's heavy focus on immigration could be working for him.

Voters consistently rate it a top election issue, including in Pennsylvania — one of seven crucial swing states which are likely to decide the election.

In a Washington Post poll last month, for example, 48 per cent of respondents in Pennsylvania rated immigration as "extremely important". And 52 per cent of Pennsylvania voters said Trump would do a better job on immigration, compared to 39 per cent for Harris. (That same poll found Harris just slightly ahead of Trump in the state overall.)

Kevin Armstrong, whose Charleroi home is decorated with flags promoting Trump and disparaging Joe Biden, said many locals felt the town's Haitian migrants "live better than us and rub it in our face".

Haitians, along with Cubans, granted entry to the US are eligible for cash assistance through a resettlement program, which undocumented migrants from other places generally cannot access unless they are granted refugee or asylum-seeker status.

"I'm 59 years old, I've worked my entire life and they live better than me," Mr Armstrong said. "They're reaping my benefits. They're reaping my dad's benefits."

"I don't care what Trump says, they ain't causing problems, and they are legal," said one local, who said he worked with many Haitian migrants. "You look at where they are coming from, the history of Haiti. They don't want no problems, they want peace."

Another woman, a restaurant worker, said she believed racism was the real problem.

"I personally have no problem with them," she said.

"They come in here sometimes and they are very, very kind.

"But a lot of people don't feel that way and they were gunning for them the instant they were here."