Angry residents of a remote Indiana city complain of being deluged by migrants from Haiti and elsewhere, putting a strain on schools, hospitals, and other social services.
Locals of Logansport, a city of 18,000 in the center of the state, say students are being muscled out of public schools by an influx of thousands of foreign newcomers.
They say the migrants came for jobs at a local meat-packing plant, but that their kids can't speak English and suck up the attention of teachers, dragging down standards.
Barrie McClain, a retired teacher, said public schools and healthcare facilities were 'impacted terribly' by the influx and urged the federal government to bail out her cash-strapped city.
'The native born are now a minority in the local school system,' McClain, a county GOP treasurer, told The Mail.
They have to figure out how to educate all these folks, without having anybody who knows how to translate for a lot of the languages. So those are big problems. '
She said Logansport Memorial Hospital was overcrowded nowadays and the local board of health was 'trying to deal with diseases we don't normally deal with in the US.'
Unchecked immigration has become a top issue for voters in Vice President Kamala Harris' election battle against former president Donald Trump, who vows to deport millions of 'illegals' if he wins next month.
Logansport has become the latest immigration flash point, after a slew of headlines about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and Latino gangsters running amok in apartment blocks in Aurora, Colorado.
In those cities, Trump and other Republicans have been accused of painting migrants as a threat and stirring up fears in a bid to win votes in his tight race against Harris.
It remains unclear exactly how many migrants have arrived in Logansport — but Cass County Health Department Administrator Serenity Alter told The Post that the surrounding area's population has surged nearly a third.
That would amount to some 11,000 newcomers in a county of just 38,000 people in 2020.
Logansport Mayor Chris Martin, estimates that 2,000-3,000 Haitian migrants have arrived these past four years.
Martin spoke of 'some assimilation issues' from the influx of people with 'different culture beliefs.'
But he added that Trump and other national political should 'stop playing politics with the smaller communities.'
'We would rather you do your job and actually do something instead of talking about this,' Martin told The Post.
McClain said that the Haitian migrants were drawn to work at the nearby Tyson Foods poultry plant — jobs that locals would not take.
The county has absorbed large numbers of migrants from Mexico, Myanmar, and Vietnam, in recent decades, she added.
They were willing to do jobs eschewed by other Americans, and many went on to open businesses and were a pillar of the local economy, said McClain.
Meanwhile, Cass County health chiefs have described a surge in medical visits and a strain on local emergency rooms.
Dozens of migrants cram into shared homes, helping spread such diseases as tuberculosis, said Alter.
Officials have had to 'boost translation services in order to ensure that medical needs are understood,' she said.
Though they may have entered the US without a visa, Haitians are entitled to Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and work permits because their impoverished Caribbean homeland is such a mess.
Candice Espinoza, 32, a local photographer, says she feels less comfortable in her city since the Haitians started turning up.
'It's not safe. They just stare at you and won't talk to you.' Espinoza told The Post.
'They stand there staring at my house with cameras on their phones. I don't know if they're recording, what they're doing.'
The rattled mom-of-two says she's installed cameras on her home and that her business was suffering because customers would no longer come to her business.
'My clients wouldn't even get out of their car for their photo shoot. I had to take them somewhere else because they are scared of them' she said.
'You don't feel easy when someone is constantly watching you.'
She added: 'They've been there at night and I will not lie, it's scared me to death. Three guys just standing in the dark staring around in the neighborhood, that's scary. I don't care what color you are. That's not something I want.'
She's also worried about how her kids' education is suffering because the non-English-speaking Haitian students suck up all the 'special treatment' from teachers.
Their reading, their comprehension is going to lessen because they're going to have to lower the kids' expectations,' she said of her children aged 10 and 13.
Espinoza says she'll vote for Trump in November because the Democrats have let down Indiana with their loose border policy.
Nancy Baker, a mom of two, says 16-year-old daughter Cheyanne dropped out of high school and now studies online because teachers had no time left for English-speaking pupils.
'There were way too many kids, and it seemed to her that since they didn't speak the language, or didn't understand what was going on, they were getting more attention,' Baker told The Post.
'And so she and the other kids who grew up here who were having issues or struggling in certain things weren't able to get the attention that they needed.'
The 44-year-old blamed President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris, the Democratic candidate in this year's election, for not securing the southern border amid record migrant flows.
A Reuters investigation this month found that more than half a million school-age migrant children have entered the US since 2022, straining budgets and worsening overcrowding.
Teachers were being forced to grapple with language barriers and inflaming social tensions in places unaccustomed to educating immigrants, such as Logansport, researchers found.
Some 75 school districts responded to a survey, with a third saying that the increase in immigrant children was having a 'significant' impact on their school district.
