By Mattathias Schwartz
Bomb scares at elementary schools. A police dog checking the bushes outside City Hall. Threats against local officials.
It has been a chilling couple of weeks for Springfield, Ohio, since former President Donald Trump pulled the city into the presidential race with baseless claims that Haitian immigrants there were abducting and eating household pets.
And trying to hold the city together has been Mayor Rob Rue, who took office not even a year ago, taking on a part-time post that has been anything but that over the past several days.
He’s made several appearances on cable news. He’s been meeting with Gov. Mike DeWine, a fellow native son of Springfield. He’s sought to reassure the thousands of Haitian immigrants in the city that they are welcome and safe.
And he’s urged his fellow Republican, Trump, not to come to Springfield right now, saying such a visit would only heighten tensions.
“This job as mayor was never supposed to have this type of intensity,” Rue, 54, said in a telephone interview Friday. “But when you sign up to serve a city, you never know what’s coming.”
This past week it fell to him to declare a state of emergency, Springfield’s first since the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing the city to expedite contracts for any additional security that becomes necessary, particularly if Trump does decide to visit, as he said he intended to do.
The election-year pressures on the city’s mayoralty are unusual in Springfield, where day-to-day operations are normally overseen by a city manager. The mayor, as the elected head of the City Commission, is the leader of almost 60,000 people and the face of local government. But it’s not supposed to be a full-time role, reflected by an annual salary of just under $15,000.
The recent attention has made him a target, Rue said.
“There are threats against my family,” he said. “Emails, phone calls. They say they don’t want me around, I’m going to die, I’m a traitor, ‘We’re watching your family.’ All these things that you never want to hear.”
The recent transformation of Springfield into a national flashpoint has complicated Rue’s efforts to manage the city’s growing pains following the arrival of thousands of legal immigrants from Haiti. Their eagerness to work entry-level manufacturing jobs boosted Springfield’s economy and helped ease a decades-long population decline. But their strain on the city’s health clinics, schools and rental market prompted an angry reaction from some longtime residents, who started showing up to complain at City Commission meetings.
The meetings got more heated last year, after a minivan driven by a Haitian immigrant crashed into a school bus, killing an 11-year-old boy. Twenty other students were injured.
The mayor at that time, Warren Copeland, a Democrat who had held the office for more than a decade, found the acrimony so frustrating that he eventually asked Rue, a soft-spoken Republican who was serving as assistant mayor, to preside over the public comment period.
Managing the aggrieved and sometimes tendentious speeches of residents on livestreamed video might not have seemed glamorous at the time, but it turned out to be a proving ground for a much larger forum. In one recent meeting, after a resident began to shout condemnations of the city manager’s salary, Rue responded with calm. “We’ll have answers for you. Thank you, thank you,” he said, in his sedately ministerial voice. Copeland stepped down early in November 2023, the day after Rue won an uncontested election, and died at age 80 a few weeks later.
Rue went to high school in Springfield, college in Ohio, and is now part-owner of a funeral home, the same line of work as his father.
As a city commissioner, Rue carved out a reputation as a low-key centrist with a willingness to question some conservative orthodoxies. He voted to add protections for LGBTQ+ residents to the city’s nondiscrimination ordinance. “People shouldn’t be discriminated against based on how they live their life,” he said at the time. Last month, when the leader of a neo-Nazi group told the City Commission to start turning back Haitian immigrants “before it’s too late,” Rue kicked him out of the meeting.
“It’s not free speech. That’s a threat,” Rue said, citing guidelines prohibiting threats at commission meetings.
In July, as anti-immigrant sentiment was beginning to build, Rue and the city manager, Bryan Heck, appeared on “Fox & Friends.” They said that the new Haitian arrivals were taxing the city’s resources and that they needed more help from the federal government. They blamed the Biden administration’s immigration policies for the strain. Their appearance helped thrust Springfield into the national immigration debate and the presidential election.
By that time, rumors about immigrants had begun to metastasize on social media, where some Springfield residents shared baseless hearsay about missing pets.
After Trump chose to amplify those falsehoods on a national stage — despite a city official having told his campaign beforehand that those claims were wrong — Rue repeatedly went on cable news to push back. On Friday, he said his objective was to defend Springfield’s reputation.
“When a national leader says, ‘It’s horrible there,’ that bothered me, as it should any mayor of any city,” he said. “When your city is misrepresented, you want to get out there and represent who we really are.”
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