In the schools and churches of Springfield, Ohio, people are again making hasty preparations for a “large deportation” of Haitians promised by the president.

Back in February, when I first wrote on this subject, the city was on the brink of a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the vice-president and American Nazis, in the context of the racially hateful language of the president. The deportation was halted by a district court in February on the correct ground that the decision to deport them was based on race. Ethnic cleansing has now been endorsed by the Supreme Court.

Before the district court and the the Supreme Court, Haitian plaintiffs claimed, with much evidence, that race was one of the motivating factors of the decision of the executive branch to terminate the protected status that allowed them to remain in the United States. The Supreme Court majority just chose, in a ruling that was openly counter-factual, to imagine that what was patently racist might not have been, and that the transparent motivations of the president and his administration “could have” have been different from what they were.

Self-lying by the powerful is often element of an ethnic cleansing campaign.

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The Haitian plaintiffs drew attention to the following statements of the president (cited by a minority in a dissent). Haitians are “eating the dogs… They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live (in Springfield, Ohio).” Haitians are also eating, the president claimed, “other things too that they’re not supposed to be.” Haitians in the United States, he said, “probably have AIDS.” Haiti is a “shithole country,” which is “filthy, dirty, (and) disgusting.” Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” Haitians are “poisoning the blood” of America.

This lexical context should have been more than enough to show that race was one of the motivating factors.

The historical context, which the Supreme Court also set aside, reveals a very specific campaign against the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, initiated by JD Vance, American Nazis, and Donald Trump.

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The question of who is human and who is not can be defined by animals. In a predominantly rural society, the claim that people are beasts is a suggestion that they can be slaughtered. In an urban or suburban setting, in which animals are companions, the idea that others mistreat animals can be the signal that they are not like us, barbarians, not fully human. Among the many other accelerating repressions, Jews in Nazi Germany were not allowed to keep pets at home. In the US, the slur of eating pets has traditionally been applied to Asians. The idea that Black people eat the wrong things in the wrong way is a staple of American racism.

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Hitler gave very specific propaganda guidance in Mein Kampf: a Nazi leader should tell a lie so big that his people cannot accept that they could be deceived on such a scale. And that is one logic, for those predisposed to believe a cat-eating-scale liar like Vance and to accept that the violence was justified. Others, those who do not trust Vance, might still find it hard to believe that their own government, however untrustworthy, is really about to carry out an ethnic cleansing operation just because Nazis march and the vice-president messages. That is, however, the origin story of this policy; and by ignoring it, the Supreme Court takes part in what comes next.

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This was the step needed to deprive Haitians of the official Temporary Protected Status that allows them to live and work legally in the United States. Read attentively, the text reveals that conditions in Haiti remain disastrous. At most, there is some weak gesturing towards the future possibility of some improvement — which, in normal times, would be obviously insufficient to deprive Haitians of their status. There is no sense of such improvement in State Department documents, such as the current travel advisory strongly discouraging Americans from visiting Haiti.

The concluding claim of the finding is that the presence of Haitians “is contrary to the US national interest.” This assertion, which is presented as dispositive of all other issues, goes unexplained and undefended. What national interest, exactly? How? The only answer is a vague reference to Trump’s beliefs. In the context of the previous events, the meaning is clear enough. The beliefs that Trump had expressed, following Vance, were all about race. The president and the vice-president had repeated that Haitians eat domestic animals, cause diseases, commit violent crimes, and wreck cities. These very specific dicta about Haitians originated with JD Vance and American Nazis. Given the lack of any other explanation, it would seem reasonable to conclude that the motive of the policy is the racial hatred expressed by the president and the vice-president. This was the determination of a district court that cited some of these facts; it was overturned by a Supreme Court majority last week that cited none of them.

This expression of state of mind is one reason why, should a major ICE operation go forward in Springfield, it would have to be seen as the ethnic cleansing of an American city. To be sure, the appearance of racial difference drives ICE raids all over the country. But in the case of the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, we have a particularly clear trail from public racism to practical policy. This is what lawyers and historians concerned with genocide try to ascertain: was there the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”? It is not easy to settle questions of intent, or of genocide generally; but the expression of racial fantasy about “carnage,” “destruction,” and barbarism by the vice-president and the president weighs on one side of the scale.

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There are at least ten thousand men, women, and children who will be subject to arrest and deportation in Springfield alone. These are those men and women at work, “who one day will be able to work, and the next day will not be able to work,” as the governor put it – the Supreme Court ruling means that people who try to work will be seized in their workplaces, and if not seized in their home.

Those are adults; we also have to imagine the children. Roughly twenty percent of the children in Springfield Public Schools do not have documentation that would establish their citizenship. All of these boys and girls, about fifteen hundred children, are vulnerable. As in other cities, they can be taken from schools and away from their parents, or return home to find their parents gone. The Ohio Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the state, “strongly opposes” any presence of ICE agents in schools, which “undermines trust, disrupts learning, and creates trauma for children and families.”

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The work to normalize racist and Nazi language looks exactly like the Court’s ruling; the overwrought performative neutrality of the Court is not only dishonest in itself, but constructive in its outrageous mendacity of an atmosphere of unreality that favors violence. The Court, in other words, in not only permitting the executive to undertake violent actions; by doing so on the basis of transparently obvious falsehoods, it is actively creating the conditions in which such violence can be rationalized and escalated.

The violence, once it comes, changes normality: first of all, for the people who are rounded up and held in the concentration camps we call “detention centers,” preparatory to being sent either somewhere they do not want to go, or dying in custody. And this leaves trauma among the survivors in the most obvious, incontestable sense.

But everyone who observes also partakes in the trauma. The kids who remain in Springfield schools after their friends disappear will need to tell themselves something. Their parents will need to think of what to tell them. Everyone around has to ask how it came to this. The trauma becomes a political resource. The perpetrators of an ethnic cleansing use the emotion to reshape how we see our neighbors — and ourselves. Most people, I expect, would be appalled by an ethnic cleansing in Springfield. The ethnic cleanser, though, rules with the help of those who are not, those who comply, agree, take part. And in this way ethnic cleansing itself is a step away from democracy and towards minority rule by a police state served by those willing to wear the mask.

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And what history will the rest of us write for ourselves? When we are confronted with street terror, concentration camps, and mass deportations, as now in the United States, the thought of historical precedents arises — and is usually suppressed. “It can’t happen here,” we think, so this must not be “it.” When we take the focus down from the national to the local, to the story of Springfield, this is a bit harder to maintain. The “it” is right there in front of our faces.

We confront here no historical analogy, but actual twenty-first century American Nazis who took their cues from the man who is now vice-president, acted in the public sphere, shaped the public conversation, and are now getting the policy outcome that they desired from a Supreme Court that whitewashes the history in which they played a central part. As the mayor noted after Blood Tribe marched in Springfield, the aim was to “disrupt the community” — and now, thanks to the Supreme Court, that disruption can take on a catastrophic scale.

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An ICE surge in Ohio is not inevitable. Trump does not have to order his promised “large deportation.” In April the House of Representatives passed legislation extending protected status for Haitians. But the Senate would have to agree and the president would have to choose not to exercise his veto.

In the five months between the district court ruling and the Supreme Court ruling, Trump has become even more unpopular. It is possible that he wiIl avoid a single dramatic cleansing action and instead try to get rid of Haitians in smaller groups, or by taking actions that make their lives here intolerable. Whatever policy he chooses, it can be resisted, recorded, given its place in history by those with the courage to be present and to speak about what they see. There will be other Courts, and other Americans, who will care about this history, and how we choose to make it and see it. The seeing, just the seeing, is of huge importance, for all of us. When we see, we can feel and we can act. We can empathize, communicate, shelter, protest, help.