Former President Donald Trump made a claim during the presidential debate last Tuesday evening that shocked most viewers and listeners. Referring to immigrants, he said, “In Springfield (Ohio) they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there.”

As a person who has always loved having cats or dogs or both around our home, I found this claim bizarre and shocking. Then I learned the rest of the story.

Here's the context. Trump was responding to a question about the Republican-requested bi-partisan immigration and Ukraine aid bill.

Senate Republicans made it clear in October 2023 that they wouldn't approve any aid to Ukraine without a bill that also helped secure the southern US border. While Ukraine suffered through the winter without re-armament from the US, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, and minority leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY and a committee negotiated.

By late January this year they had agreed on a bill. Within 48 hours of going public with the proposal, however, McConnell told reporters it was dead. Why? Because Trump had convinced 45 of the 49 Republican senators to vote against it.

The word from Washington was Trump had been outraged. If the bill passed, the Biden-Harris administration would have been able to put 1,500 more agents patrolling our southern border.

A more secure US-Mexico border, though, would be a blow to Trump's election strategy. How could he argue on the campaign trail that Democrats were not solving immigration problems if Republicans actually worked with them to solve some? He had picked up the phone and killed the bill.

When asked about immigration, Vice President Kamala Harris brought up the border security legislation, saying if Trump hadn't blocked it the flow of fentanyl into the US could have been slowed and the administration would have been given more resources to fight “trafficking in guns, drugs and human beings.”

It was then Trump's turn to speak. ABC News debate moderator David Muir asked Trump why the former president tried, successfully, “to kill that bill?”

So, Trump was responding to a question about US immigration policy when he accused immigrants of eating pets. It is likely no surprise to you that the former president did not say one single word in response to the question about why he deep-sixed an immigration reform bill.

In fairness to him, however, he apparently believed what he was saying about immigrants being pet-eaters. The source of the allegation—a conspiratorial falsehood--was a social media post that Trump's running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, R-OH, took as the truth and went public with last Monday.

For the record, so far the Springfield Police Division, the town's mayor, and officials for the surrounding county all say that while there has been an influx of legal Haitian immigrants to Springfield, there have been “no credible reports” there that any immigrant has stolen, harmed or eaten anyone's pet.

Now, there is nothing funny about alleged animal cruelty. However, there is an important human point to all this.

The US does have serious immigration problems. It has had for at least the last 140 years, since late in the 19th century, before the US even had federal oversight of immigration.

Twenty years ago there were an estimated 10-million illegal immigrants in the US. That number is well over 11-million now.

The last time Congress passed comprehensive immigration reform was in 1986. That was 38 years ago! Isn't it time to get serious about dealing with our immigration issues rather than playing political games with our borders?

Demonizing people has been Trump's approach to immigration. During the debate he claimed immigrants are criminals, terrorists, drug dealers, and said, without evidence, “Those people are killing many people.”

The truth is immigrants, and even undocumented immigrants, are on average more law abiding than US-born people. This has been found true in studies as far back as the 1960s and as recently as 2019.

The former president is an intelligent person. He knows his words influence people and he picks them for that effect. It's unfortunate that he was willing to grasp a fake social media meme to try to make his point in the presidential debate.

It didn't make him sound presidential. Rather, he came across as an old man refusing to debate public policy, but instead using pets to demonize migrants who come here seeking a better life.