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Following President-elect Donald Trump’s sweeping victory in the election earlier this month, illegal immigrants in small town USA are fleeing to “sanctuary cities” and, in some cases, even “self-deporting.”

According to both CBS News and The Guardian, thousands of Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield, Ohio, are rushing to Chicago, New York City, and other “sanctuary” locations before Trump is sworn into office and initiates his pledged mass deportation program.

Springfield, a city of less than 60,000, has been crippled ever since the outgoing Biden-Harris administration imported roughly 20,000 Haitian immigrants into the municipality starting in 2021. The city has seen a drastic rise in housing costs and traffic accidents and has been forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to accommodate the immigrants, who were granted “temporary protected status” by the Biden-Harris administration.

Many Haitians in Springfield have taken Trump’s promise of mass deportations—to be enacted by his new “border czar,” former Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director and immigration hardliner Tom Homan—seriously. Trump has vowed to terminate the temporary protected status granted to the Haitians, causing many to leave the Ohio city that Trump mentioned during a presidential debate. Popular destinations for the immigrants include Chicago, New York City, Boston, Canada, and even Brazil, where many Haitian migrants had previously been granted temporary asylum before illegally entering the U.S.

In comments to The Washington Stand, Andrew Arthur, senior fellow in Law and Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, said, “Just the threat of ‘mass deportation’ has changed the dynamics for the millions of illegal aliens currently present in the United States, many of whom were drawn here by the Biden-Harris administration’s promises of de facto amnesty and indefinite presence in the United States.” 

He continued, “Now that they are facing the real threat of enforcement and deportation, a significant number will simply decide to leave on their own, which will make border czar Tom Homan’s job of restoring credibility to the U.S. immigration system much easier.” 

Arthur added, “It’s the very definition of a ‘virtuous circle’ of enforcement and compliance.”

While many immigrants have indicated that they would flee to sanctuary cities, where officials refuse to deport illegal immigrants, Homan has warned that even these cities will be subject to mass deportations.

A coalition of Democratic governors and mayors have already announced that they plan to resist Trump’s deportation program. Among them is Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, who posited that he would use city law enforcement officers and 50,000 residents to block deportation efforts in what he called a “Tiananmen Square moment.” Johnston later retracted his comments about using police to oppose federal officials, but he did encourage citizens to “protest” deportation efforts and said that he was “not afraid” of going to prison.

In response, Homan said that Johnston would be “absolutely breaking the law.” He added, “Me and the Denver mayor, we agree on one thing: He’s willing to go to jail; I’m willing to put him in jail.”

Homan continued, “If he doesn’t want to help, that’s fine. He can get the hell out of the way. But we’re gonna go do the job. President Trump has a mandate from the American people. We’ve got to secure this country, we’ve got to save American lives.”

Heading into the election, immigration was consistently rated one of the top two concerns for voters, often closely following inflation. A majority of Americans also signaled at least some support for Trump’s proposed mass deportation program. But a new poll shows that nearly three-quarters of Americans want Trump to make mass deportations a “priority.”

According to a CBS News/YouGov survey, 73% of American adults say that deporting illegal immigrants should be a “priority” for Trump’s administration, including 45% of Americans who say it should be a “high priority.”

Additionally, nearly 60% of respondents said that they want Trump to initiate “a national program to find and deport all immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally.” A majority (64%) also favor Trump mobilizing federal law enforcement agencies that don’t typically interact with immigration in order to assist with deportations.

Originally published by The Washington Stand.