(New York Post) 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 of 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 to 3,000 over the last four years.
What’s clear is that the number of Haitian immigrant students in the Logansport schools has 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.
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.”
