Longtime Albertville pastor Johny Pierre-Charles says he is frequently receiving calls from Alabama migrants who are terrified to leave their houses as a result of recent hostility toward his city’s Haitian community.
“They want to know what will happen after the election and if they should start trying to get to Canada,” Pierre-Charles told The Atlantic’s Elaina Plott Calabro.
Photos of Haitian immigrants being bused to and from work at a poultry processing plant in Albertville in August sparked questions about who the people were and where they came from, prompting what city officials called “baseless accusations and hurtful rhetoric,” according to AL.com’s William Thornton.
This led to a series of community meetings and the establishment of a non-profit.
In Athens and Sylacauga, citizens have been particularly concerned about foreign workers and their impact on crime, school congestion, and housing.
However, officials there stated Haitian immigrants make up a small percentage of the population, and there has been no uptick in violence since more immigrants began arriving this year following upheaval on the Caribbean island, Thornton wrote.
“There are definitely people who feel differently about the situation in our community, but there are so many of us who want this to be a place of peace, where people are welcome to come and lay down roots and be the family that God has called us to be,” said Jeff Lamour, an Albertville resident and businessman of Haitian descent.
In September, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall met with Talladega County law enforcement to provide assistance in response to false claims made by former President Donald Trump about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating their neighbors’ dogs.
“It was embarrassing,” Sylacauga mayor Jim Heigl told Calabro. “He met with our county’s task force, he met with the sheriffs, he met with all our police investigators, everything—and he could not find anything wrong.”
In an effort to bring healing to the Albertville neighborhood, Lamour helped organize a prayer gathering last month that attracted over 100 people from at least ten different Haitian, Hispanic, and white congregations.
He told me, “We want to reeducate people to integrate them into our community.”
