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Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice presidential nominee, said Wednesday that he would continue to describe Haitian residents in Springfield, Ohio, as “illegal aliens” even though most of them are in the country legally.

The immigrants are mainly in the United States under a program called temporary protected status, which the executive branch can grant to people whose home countries are in crisis. Vance claimed falsely that this program was illegal.

“If Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien,” he said in response to a reporter’s question after a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina. “An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal.”

Congress created the temporary protected status program in 1990, and presidents from both major parties have used it in response to wars, natural disasters and other humanitarian crises in various countries. The program allows people from countries designated by the Department of Homeland Security to live and work legally in the United States for 18 months, a period that the department can renew indefinitely. It does not include a path to permanent residency or citizenship.

The Obama administration granted temporary protected status to Haitians living in the United States illegally after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti in January 2010. Under President Joe Biden, the Department of Homeland Security has granted or renewed temporary protected status to immigrants from a number of countries, including Haiti, Ukraine and Venezuela. Harris did not make those decisions.

Former President Donald Trump has long criticized the program. His administration sought to end protections for people from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sudan, though some of those decisions were challenged in court, and Biden reversed some.

Trump recently said that the mass deportations he has vowed to carry out would begin with immigrants in Springfield, Ohio (largely Haitians) and Aurora, Colorado (largely Venezuelans), which would mean the removal of thousands of people living and working legally with temporary protected status.

Vance’s comments Wednesday were of a piece with his and Trump’s attacks over the past two weeks. They have repeatedly spread false claims that Haitians in Springfield are stealing and eating pets, smears that local officials — including Republicans — and journalists have debunked.

Schools and offices in Springfield have received bomb threats for days, leading Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio to deploy the state police. DeWine and the mayor of Springfield, Rob Rue, both Republicans, have denounced the false claims from Vance and Trump.

“It’s frustrating when national politicians, on the national stage, mischaracterize what is actually going on and misrepresent our community,” Rue said last week, calling the bomb threats a “hateful response to immigration in our town.”

DeWine told ABC News on Sunday that the claim that migrants were eating pets was “a piece of garbage” and that, while the influx of thousands of people over a short period of time had brought some “challenges,” Springfield’s Haitian residents were there legally and had benefited the city economically.

Around the same time DeWine was speaking Sunday, Vance was standing by the claims in a series of interviews, telling CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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