CBS News cut off Senator J. D. Vance’s microphone during the vice presidential debate on Tuesday evening as he pushed back on a purported fact-check from debate moderator Margaret Brennan.
Vance was speaking about the problems Springfield, Ohio, is facing due to an explosion in the city’s Haitian immigrant population when the clash occurred.
“In Springfield, Ohio, and in communities all across this country you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you’ve got housing that is totally unaffordable because we’ve brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes,” Vance said.
Brennan later jumped in to offer an alleged “fact-check” of Vance’s comments.
“Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status, temporary protected status,” she said, before attempting to move on to the next debate topic.
Vance pushed back, “Margaret, the rules were that you weren’t going to fact-check and since you’re fact checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on: so there’s an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open-border wand.”
“That is not a person coming in and applying for a green card and waiting for ten years, that is the facilitation of illegal immigration, Margaret, by our own leadership and Kamala Harris opened up that pathway,” Vance said.
As Vance continued talking, the moderators cut off his microphone.
“We have so much we want to get to, thank you for explaining the legal process,” Brennan said.
At the start of the debate, the moderators claimed their primary role was only to facilitate the debate by enforcing the rules and providing the candidates with the opportunity to fact-check claims made by each other.
Springfield, which had a population of 58,000 people in 2022, is home to an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 Haitian immigrants. Many of these Haitian migrants are eligible for the TPS program, which was opened to asylum seekers from Haiti in 2010 after an earthquake devastated the country. While the Trump administration initially extended the TPS protections, it later sought to end them, but faced legal challenges. President Biden then extended the program’s protections in June through February 2026.
Nonetheless, illegal immigration has exploded under the Biden-Harris administration. Customs and Border Protection agents have reported 8 million illegal immigrant encounters at the southern border since Biden took office. By the start of this year, nearly 2 million illegal immigrants had entered the country after successfully evading border patrol agents.
Springfield has been at the center of the country’s immigration debate since last month, when former president Donald Trump peddled a conspiracy theory that immigrants in the community are slaughtering and consuming local pets.
“The people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump claimed during the presidential debate in September, before going on to suggest Harris would destroy the country if she were to become president. “We’ll end up being Venezuela on steroids.”
Trump’s comments were in reference to a popular conspiracy theory circulating among his followers online that Haitian immigrants in the Ohio community have been eating pets. The claims seem to stem from an amalgamation of several different stories, beginning with comments from a local resident who claimed at a meeting of the city commission last month that Haitian immigrants in the city were slaughtering park ducks for food.
Vance himself had previously shared the theory and said illegal immigrants were “causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio”.
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