LOGANSPORT, Indiana — Thousands of migrants from Haiti and dozens of other countries have arrived in this isolated Indiana city of 18,000 in just a few years.
Furious residents say they no longer feel safe in the once sleepy downtown, and their kids are being muscled out of the schools by new students who don’t know English and need a lot more help.
They blame Vice President Kamala Harris and President Biden.
“Do something. Our community cannot withstand this many people being here,” Candice Espinoza, 32, a local photographer, told The Post when asked what her message would be to the Democratic presidential candidate.
Nancy Baker, 44, a mother of two, was more blunt about what she would tell Harris: “Get off my property.”
“I don’t see how she can stand behind Biden the whole time and she keeps deflecting anytime they ask questions.”
It’s not entirely clear 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 30%.
That would put the arriving number of migrants at more than 11,000 — in a county that had just 38,000 people in 2020.
Another rough estimate, from Logansport Mayor Chris Martin, pegs the number of arrivals from the impoverished Caribbean country at 2,000-3,000 over the last four years.
What’s clear is that the number of Haitian immigrant students in the Logansport schools have increased 15-fold, from 14 in 2021 to 207 this year.
Baker said her 16-year-old daughter, Cheyanne, dropped out of the local high school because teachers seemingly had no time for the English-speaking pupils anymore.
“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 said.
“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 help they needed from the school,” she said.
As the former honor roll student’s grades began to slip, Cheyanne gave up on Logansport High School and enrolled in an online homeschool instead.
“You can’t just focus all your resources on one group of children and everybody else is falling behind,” the exasperated mom said.
“And you wonder why these kids are getting frustrated and dropping out of school and getting bad grades.”
Cheyanne expressed her own frustration with the migrants, many of them unaccompanied minors or young men — who are believed to have been drawn by the Tyson poultry plant in town.
“It’s like the teacher is so busy with them that no one else gets to learn anything, it feels like,” she shared.
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Baker even claims her teen daughter was verbally accosted by Haitian migrants as she walked to a local coffee shop.
“She was walking by herself and she was walking that way and two of them were going this way, she just kinda smiled at them as they walked by. They started yelling for her after they got past her. She turned around and she looked at them and they were like, ‘Come here! Come here!’” Baker said.
“She’s like, ‘no, no, no, I’m good.’ She started walking fast. They chased her. She had to run all the way down to the coffee shop,” the mom said. “She’s scared to go outside.”
Baker said she no longer feels safe in her community, and slammed the federal government for the impact their lackluster response to the migrant crisis is having on local kids.
“We can help people, that’s fine. But not at the cost of our children.”
Espinoza, the photographer who is also a mom, said she’s had her own unnerving encounters with Haitian migrants, whom she says regularly stare into her window from across the street.
“It’s not safe. They just stare at you and won’t talk to you,” she said. “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 interactions have rattled the mother-of-two to the point where she’s now afraid to leave her home and has installed cameras on her property.
She claims the gawkers from out of town have even frightened some of her photography customers.
“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.”
“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.”
Espinoza, whose kids are 10 and 13, has also seen the quality of her kids’ school time decline since the migrant students arrived.
She said teachers give the Haitian students “special treatment” by pulling them aside to ensure the migrant youngsters understand the assignment, and that it’s coming at the expense of other students in the classrooms.
“Their reading, their comprehension is going to lessen because they’re going to have to lower the kids’ expectations,” she said.
She says she plans to vote for former President Donald Trump — in part because she’s frustrated by the Biden-Harris administration’s lackadaisical border enforcement policies during Harris’ underwhelming tenure as border czar.
“I know that when he becomes president, that’s when our state will become better,” she said. “That’s when our country will become better. He stands for the people. What is Harris doing?”
Meanwhile, Cass County health officials have sounded the alarm that the rapid population growth of migrants from a country which provides little-to-no medical screening is burdening local emergency rooms.
This surge has created a drastic climb in medical visits,” Alter, the county health administrator, said.
“It has been necessary for the hospital, health department and express clinics to boost translation services in order to ensure that medical needs are understood.”
She said conditions the migrants were living under — sometimes cramming 20-25 individuals in the same living space — has seen communicable diseases like tuberculosis flourish.
The story in Logansport mirrors the reports of Springfield, Ohio; Charleroi, Pennsylvania; and other small cities that have seen a similarly baffling influx of migrants in recent years as a result of the Biden-Harris border policies.
Logansport Mayor Chris Martin admitted the city is facing “some assimilation issues” stemming from the rapid migrant influx, but primarily chalked it up to “different culture beliefs.”
He told The Post he wishes national political figures like Trump and Harris would butt out.
“Simply put: Stop playing politics with the smaller communities. We don’t like this. We don’t appreciate this. We would rather you do your job and actually do something instead of talking about this.”
Additional reporting by Jennie Taer.