A Haitian immigrant who had grown increasingly distraught after losing his protection from deportation and being outfitted with an ankle monitor was run over and killed Monday in what his family believes was a suicide.
Pierre Damas Bel, 20, parked on the shoulder of Interstate 70 in Springfield, Ohio, some time before 8:45 a.m., got out of his vehicle and walked into westbound traffic, the Ohio State Highway Patrol told local media outlets. He was hit by a tractor-trailer and pronounced dead at the scene.
Bel, like 350,000 other Haitians who have made the United States home for several years at the explicit invitation of the United States government, was recently stripped of temporary protected status. He had a pending asylum claim but had been summoned to an ICE office where federal immigrant agents placed an electronic monitoring device on his ankle. He was almost certainly going to be sent back to Haiti, where criminal gangs essentially rule the country, committing massacres and kidnapping and extorting innocent, vulnerable people.
Bel fled Haiti as a teenager in 2021 and was reunited with his family in Springfield in 2024. He graduated high school with honors in May. He was a member of his high school’s JROTC program and dreamed of joining a college corps of cadets. He was described as a smart and responsible young man. But now he is dead because, in the words of his father, “he felt like he was treated like an animal” and he was about to be sent to a country where, at the very least misery and in all likelihood danger and death awaited him.
The only reason this happened is because in September 2024 J.D. Vance, then the junior U.S. Senator from Ohio, went on national television in a vice presidential debate and spread what he knew to be baseless lies about his very own constituents, claiming that Haitians in Springfield were criminals and monsters who were eating people’s pets. Despite being confronted about that lie, Vance persisted and even doubled down, posting on Twitter later that week that Haitians were likewise spreading communicable diseases like tuberculosis and HIV. Again, this was the most malicious sort of slander, the likes of which Nazis spread about the Jews in the runup to the Holocaust, but Vance didn’t give a shit because it got him media attention and it pleased Donald Trump at a time when Vance was increasingly being seen as a liability to the campaign.
Until that moment, the Haitians here under temporary protected status were not in Trump’s crosshairs. Vance placed them squarely there. It was only after his comments and tweets that Trump, who had rarely if ever had mentioned Haitians before then, immediately began repeating Vance’s lies about them “eating dogs and cats” as part of his stump speeches and media appearances. The vile racist blood libel that Vance cravenly invented from whole cloth became a lightning rod moment that solidified what had been a shaky relationship between himself and Trump and provided a month’s worth of galvanizing ugliness for the Republican base and media apparatus.
Trump and his shock troops have already killed a countless number of people in the course of their fascist campaign against immigrants and racial and religious minorities. But the Haitian death toll, which will soon likely climb disturbingly high, is primarily the responsibility of J.D. Vance. He’s the one who betrayed his fellow Ohioans in order to cynically and maliciously demagogue their very existence into a campaign talking point. He’s the reason why their temporary protected status was subsequently revoked. He’s the reason why a 20 year-old honor student named Pierre Damas Bel who was previously thriving in this country and who wanted to serve it by going to college, becoming a U.S. military officer, and then a doctor instead walked in front of a speeding truck on Interstate 70 on Monday. It was J.D. Vance who sought to inflict upon him the sort of misery and inevitable harm which made death on a stretch of western Ohio freeway seem like a better option.
People like J.D. Vance, his political allies and supporters, and the media apparatus that protects him routinely espouse the idea, sometimes explicitly but always implicitly, that all immigrants are accountable for the actions of one criminal in their midst. But people like Vance are never held accountable for their explicit words and actions or the foreseeable, tragic outcomes they cause. For this reason I expect nothing to happen to Vance over this or any other action he takes. I expect him to remain in office, and even if he is never elected to a public position again, I expect him to grow even wealthier and more influential than he is today. Like Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney, Vance is far more likely to die in a comfortable bed at an advanced age than he is to face the justice he deserves for his crimes. Our system has proven itself unwilling and incapable of holding the powerful to account and I don’t expect it to make an exception for him.
But make no mistake: J.D. Vance killed Pierre Damas Bel. He killed him every bit as effectively as he would have if he had been driving the truck that ran him over. He killed him every bit as much as he would have if he had pointed a gun at his head and pulled the trigger. People have died because Vance rightly assumed he could get away with saying anything, no matter how disgustingly untrue it was, because his targets were vulnerable Black immigrants whom very few if any powerful people or institutions ever go out of their way to defend or protect.
If there is a Hell, Vance deserves to burn in it. If there is not, he should be forever remembered as the craven, monstrous bastard that he is.
