By The Guardian (World News) | Created at 2024-09-26 16:05:15 | Updated at 2024-09-30 13:28:33
3 days ago
A Republican congressman provoked a hail of outrage after posting a racist attack on Haitian immigrants on social media, which he subsequently deleted amid calls for him to be censured.
Clay Higgins used his congressional X account to repeat debunked accusations – spread by Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee – about Haitians eating pets and broadened the attack to call them “thugs” and brand Haiti as “the nastiest country in the Western hemisphere”.
“These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters,” the Louisiana representative posted, purportedly in response to a legal action filed against Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, by a non-profit group representing Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.
“But damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th.”
The vitriolic post followed a pledge by Trump – who has doubled down on his baseless pet-eating allegations, which he first voiced at this month’s debate with Kamala Harris – to get Haitians “the hell out of Springfield”, even though most members of the community in the city are in the US legally.
It drew widespread condemnation from House Democrats, with the party’s Congressional Black caucus tabling a motion to censure Higgins.
“Rep. Clay Higgins’ vile & hateful remarks abt Haitians are unacceptable. Today, it is Haitians, but who will it be tomorrow?” the caucus posted on its X account.
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, called Higgins’s post “disgusting … vile, racist and beneath the dignity of the United States House of Representatives.
Higgins was “an election-denying, conspiracy-peddling racial arsonist who is a disgrace to the people’s House” who “must be held accountable for dishonorable conduct that is unbecoming to a member of Congress”, Jeffries wrote.
Higgins deleted the post after being approached by Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker and a fellow Louisianian. But the congressman did not apologise and later told CNN that he stood by it.
Johnson – who has appointed Higgins to a taskforce investigating attempts to assassinate Trump – told journalists that after speaking with him, Higgins “prayed about it and he regretted it and he pulled the post down.
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“That’s what you want the gentleman to do,” Johnson added.
The GOP House majority leader, Steve Scalise, rejected the censure motion, arguing it was unnecessary because the post had been deleted.
A former captain in a Louisiana sheriff’s office, Higgins was forced to resign in 2016 after he described members of a predominantly Black gang as “animals” in a video that went viral. He won his House seat months later.
A Washington Post report at the time called him a “God-fearing man of the law with a deep southern drawl” whose no-nonsense, tough-talking approach had earned him folk-hero status.
