A sign at Open Door Baptist Church, where residents gather to discuss a recent increase in Haitian migrants in the area, is pictured in Enterprise, Ala., Sept. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Safiyah Riddle)

ENTERPRISE, Ala. (AP) — The transition from the bustling Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to a small Alabama city on the southernmost tip of the Appalachian mountain range was challenging for Sarah Jacques.

But over the course of a year, the 22-year-old got used to the quiet and settled in. Jacques got a job at a manufacturing plant that makes car seats, found a Creole-language church and came to appreciate the ease and security of life in Albertville after the political turmoil and violence that's plagued her home country.

Recently, though, as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate began promoting debunked misinformation about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, causing crime and “eating pets,” Jacques said there have been new, unforeseen challenges.

“When I first got here, people would wave at us, say hello to us, but now it’s not the same,” Jacques said in Creole through a translator. “When people see you, they kind of look at you like they’re very quiet with you or afraid of you.”

Amid this mounting tension, a bipartisan group of local religious leaders, law enforcement officials and residents across Alabama sees the fallout in Springfield as a cautionary tale. They've been taking steps to help integrate the state's Haitian population in the small cities where they live.

As political turmoil and violence intensify in Haiti, Haitian migrants have embraced a program established by President Joe Biden in 2023 that allows the U.S. to accept up to 30,000 people a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela for two years and offers work authorization. The Biden administration recently announced the program could allow an estimated 300,000 Haitians to remain in the U.S. at least through February 2026.

In 2023, there were 2,370 people of Haitian ancestry in Alabama, according to census data. There is no official count of the increase in the Haitian population in Alabama since the program was implemented.

The immigration debate is not new to Albertville, where migrant populations have been growing for three decades, said Robin Lathan, executive assistant to the Albertville mayor. Lathan said the city doesn't track how many Haitians have moved to the city in recent years but said “it seems there has been an increase over the last year, in particular.”

A representative from Albertville's school system said that, in the last school year, 34% of the district’s 5,800 students were learning English as a second language — compared to only 17% in 2017.

In August, weeks before Springfield made national headlines, a Facebook post of men getting off a bus to work at a poultry plant led some residents to speculate that the plant was hiring people living in the country illegally.

Representatives for the poultry plant said in an email to The Associated Press that all its employees are legally allowed to work in the U.S.

The uproar culminated in a public meeting where some residents sought clarity about the federal program that allowed Haitians to work in Alabama legally, while others called for landlords to “cut off the housing” for Haitians and suggested that the migrants have a “smell to them,” according to audio recordings.

To Unique Dunston, a 27-year-old lifelong Albertville resident and community activist, these sentiments felt familiar.

“Every time Albertville gets a new influx of people who are not white, there seems to be a problem,” Dunston said.

Dunston runs a store offering free supplies to the community. After tensions boiled over across the country, she put up multiple billboards across town that read, in English, Spanish and Creole, “welcome neighbor glad you came.”

Dunston said the billboards are a way to “push back” against the notion that migrants are unwelcome.

When Pastor John Pierre-Charles first arrived in Albertville in 2006, he said the only other Haitians he knew in the area were his family members.

In 14 years of operation, the congregation at his Creole-language church, Eglise Porte Etroite, has gone from just seven members in 2010 to approximately 300 congregants. He is now annexing classrooms to the church building for English language classes and drivers' education classes, as well as a podcast studio to accommodate the burgeoning community.

Still, Pierre-Charles describes the last months as “the worst period” for the Haitian community in all his time in Albertville.

“I can see some people in Albertville who are really scared right now because they don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Pierre-Charles. “Some are scared because they think they may be sent back to Haiti. But some of them are scared because they don’t know how people are going to react to them.”

After the fallout from the initial public meetings in August, Pierre-Charles sent a letter to city leadership calling for more resources for housing and food to ensure his growing community could safely acclimate, both economically and culturally.

“That’s what I’m trying to do, to be a bridge,” said Pierre-Charles.

He is not working alone.

In August, Gerilynn Hanson, 54, helped organize the initial meetings in Albertville because she said many residents had legitimate questions about how migration was affecting the city.

Now, Hanson said she is adjusting her strategy, “focusing on the human level."

In September, Hanson, an electrical contractor and Trump supporter, formed a nonprofit that she hopes will work with Pierre-Charles and other Haitian community leaders to offer more stable housing and English language classes to meet the growing demand.

“We can look at (Springfield) and become them in a year,” Hanson said, referring to the animosity that’s taken hold in the Ohio city, which has been inundated with threats. “We can sit back and do nothing and let it unfold under our eyes. Or we can try to counteract some of that and make it to where everyone is productive and can speak to each other.”

Similar debates have proliferated in public meetings across the state — even in places where Haitian residents make up less than 0.5% of the entire population.

In Sylacauga, videos from numerous public meetings show residents questioning the impact of the alleged rise in Haitian migrants. Officials said there are only 60 Haitian migrants in the town of about 12,000 people southeast of Birmingham.

In Enterprise, not far from the Alabama-Florida border, cars packed the parking lot of Open Door Baptist Church in September for an event that promised answers about how the growing Haitian population was affecting the city.

After the event, James Wright, the chief of the Ma-Chis Lower Creek Indian Tribe, was sympathetic to the reasons Haitians were fleeing their home but said he worried migrants would affect Enterprise's local “political culture” and “community values.”

Other attendees echoed fears and misinformation about Haitian migrants being “lawless” and “dangerous.”

But some came to try to ease mounting anxieties about the migrant community.

Enterprise police Chief Michael Moore said he shared statistics from his department that show no measurable increase in crimes as the Haitian population has grown.

“I think there was quite a few people there that were more concerned about the fearmongering than the migrants,” Moore told the AP.

Moore said his department had received reports of Haitian migrants living in houses that violated city code, but when he reached out to the people in question, the issues were quickly resolved. Since then, his department hasn't heard any credible complaints about crimes caused by migrants.

“I completely understand that some people don’t like what I say because it doesn’t fit their own personal thought process,” said Moore. “But those are the facts.”

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Riddle is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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This story was first published on Oct. 6, 2024. It was updated on Oct 9, 2024, to correct that Pastor John Pierre-Charles was not involved with the formation of the nonprofit that Gerilynn Hanson started.

News from © The Associated Press, 2024