Some locals now call Charleroi ‘Little Haiti’ as it finds itself in the middle of a heated immigration debate
: Dermot Tatlow for The Telegraph
In her office in Charleroi high school, Amy Nelson, the assistant principal, gives a big, loving hug to the little Haitian girl she is hoping to adopt after her mother died of cancer just 10 months ago. Across town, Brandon Jericho, a company manager, tells me Haitian migrants may not be eating cats and dogs but he has heard they have captured goats and slaughtered them in nearby Twilight Hollow.
Welcome to Charleroi, a town in Pennsylvania’s industrial heartland, that’s smack in the middle of Donald Trump’s political crosshairs.
In a little over a year, as many as 3,000 Haitians have moved into Charleroi, almost doubling its population. Their arrival has coincided with the closure of the town’s flagship Pyrex glass factory.
It’s a heady mix that has left Charleroi in the key swing state of Pennsylvania reeling and its citizens – on both sides of the immigration debate – fearful and even terrified of what might come next.
In 2020, Charleroi’s population had dwindled to just 4,200, of whom about 3,200 were white. The influx of Haitians has caused a seismic shift that Trump and his supporters have seized upon. In 2021-22, the number of non-English speaking students in Charleroi area schools was 12; now it’s 220, an increase of more than 1,700 per cent.
: Dermot Tatlow for The Telegraph
In an election that will be decided by the three key issues of the economy, immigration and Trump’s fitness to be president, Charleroi has the lot.
At a recent rally, Trump shoved the town, on the bank’s of the Monongahela River, kicking and screaming into the limelight. “Char-le-roi,” he declared at a recent rally in Pennsylvania, “What a beautiful name. But it’s not so beautiful now.”
At the gates to the Pyrex factory, which will likely soon be closed forever, Daniele Byrne, a factory worker for the past 35 years and lifelong Democrat, can’t bring herself to disagree with the former president. “Trump is right when he says it’s not so beautiful any more,” says Mrs Byrne, 53, who points to the house she grew up in, visible from where we are standing at the factory gates. A vice-president of the local steelworkers union, she is leading the fight to keep the Pyrex factory open. “This is not a town I recognise from the one I grew up in. Hell no,” she says.
: Dermot Tatlow for The Telegraph
Dozens of stores in the town’s two main streets are boarded up and closed. The factory (unless a last ditch effort to save it in the courts is successful) will shut as early as December with the loss of 350 well-paid, largely blue collar jobs. Once Pyrex dominated the town, so much so that in 2015 Charleroi was renamed Pyrex for 100 days in a stunt to mark the centenary of the product’s launch. A giant Pyrex jug, 10ft tall, took pride of place in the town’s centre. That celebration now seems like a distant, gut-wrenching memory. Some locals now call Charleroi “Little Haiti”.
Nowadays the driving force is Fourth Street Foods, which has two processing plants at either end of Charleroi employing 1,000 people. Of the 700 workers on the assembly line, almost the entirety are migrants legally working in the US on status from danger zones. About half of them are Haitians, willing to take on the laborious job of assembling thousands of sandwiches and other food products while standing in near freezing conditions in refrigerated units for $15 an hour (although one former worker there said he was paid by a third party agency just $8 an hour).
Haitians have found their way to Charleroi through a combination of word of mouth, refugee resettlement programs and recruitment agencies. The town, which has been in decline, has a source of plentiful cheap housing. (The population of Charleroi has been in decline since a pre-war peak of more than 11,000.)
: Dermot Tatlow
The mother of the little girl that Amy Nelson is trying to adopt came to Charleroi – just like most Haitians – to get a job with Fourth Street Food. But by the time she reached the town in July last year she was too sick to work. Her breast cancer had gone undetected and the disease by then was terminal.
Mrs Nelson had met the little girl just once before in the autumn. But on Dec 21, she received a call, asking her if she could look after the six-year-old overnight because her mother was close to death and wasn’t expected “to make it through the night”. She died the next day, and the girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, stayed with the Nelsons through Christmas.
Their bond was near instant – “she just became part of the family” – and by March, the girl was staying with the Nelsons five days a week, living with her mother’s boyfriend (a Haitian who was working full time at the food factory) at weekends. By July, the girl declared she wanted to live with her foster mother full-time and the assistant principal was granted temporary guardianship. A hearing in January will rule on adoption. Mrs Nelson’s husband David, 56, who is ex-military, is fully on board.
Mrs Nelson, 52, and already a mother of two grown up children, said: “Her mom gave up her life to get here. She didn’t stop to get the treatment she needed. She kept going to get her daughter to the US.”
: Dermot Tatlow for The Telegraph
Mrs Nelson watched Trump’s comments about her town, made at a rally in Pennsylvania in September, and recalls “starting to cry because I thought he is going to win and she will have to go back”. She adds: “When he mentioned Charleroi, I just thought ‘oh no’. One of my Haitian kids at the school – a teenage girl – said afterwards: ‘why do they hate us?’”
Trump has vowed to revoke the Temporary Status (TPS) given to Haitians and conduct mass deportations, leaving Mrs Nelson terrified of him winning in November. “It infuriates me. It makes me sad, it makes me worry. It’s so unfair and scary. He Trump is demonising them,” says the assistant principal.
The girl – who Mrs Nelson describes as “smart, sassy, super-sweet” – calls her new mother “my pink mom” and her birth mother “my brown mom” while Mrs Nelson has spent hours watching YouTube videos learned how to braid her foster daughter’s hair, a labour of love that takes five hours.
If Mrs Nelson has gone above and beyond to embrace the Haitian community, it’s clearly a source of great tension elsewhere in the Charleroi community. The strain on schools for example is clear. The school district has had to hire five new staff, including three teachers specialising in English as a foreign language as well as interpreters at an annual additional cost of $400,000.
Meanwhile, a number of parents have pulled their children out of Charleroi’s public schools, complaining that teachers were so busy trying to communicate with non-English speaking Haitian students that their own children were being deprived of attention. “My kids were all falling behind. It wasn’t just the immigrants, but it felt like the teachers didn’t have the time to dedicate to them,” said Beth Pellegrini after choosing to take her three children out of the public school system and send them to a charter school (which receives government funding but operates outside of the state school system).
Brandon Jericho, 30, sits on his porch, the town spread out below and tells me he feels a stranger in his own town. “In the last 10 years, Charleroi has become run down and now these migrants have come in and taken over. We feel we have lost our town,” he says. “I feel we are the minority now. I am not saying they don’t belong here but they make no attempt to integrate. They stare at us like we are the ones who don’t belong here.”
: Dermot Tatlow for The Telegraph
Rumours abound. There are claims that one shop put up a sign saying “no whites allowed,” although no solid proof has come to light. Mr Jericho, who runs a transportation company, tells me how kids on litter picking duty in the summer had found the carcass of a goat in Twilight Hollow, on the outskirts of the town and that he assumed it had been killed by immigrants. “One of the people who lives out in the country had a pet goat that was missing and that made sense. It is just crazy. Donald Trump made a comment they Haitians are eating dogs and cats. But it’s goats.”
Across the street, Nolan Walters, 21, a young white man with pro-Trump flags on his lawn and with Haitians living either side of him, is blunt, reeling off a litany of complaints. “They are ruining the town. I mean Haitians. They don’t speak the language; they go to the front of the line; they are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get people to teach them; they don’t understand the street signs so there are car accidents every week; they have crashed into people’s houses; crime has gone up; somebody got arrested for sex trafficking. I don’t know if that is true but I heard it.”
Down in the town, one of the few stores now open for business, is a legal advice centre run by Gregory Cherisme, 47, who trained as a lawyer in Haiti, but who came to Charleroi – by his own admission illegally – in 2019 to work in the food processing plant. He’s now established himself as a community leader and says estimates of 2,000 Haitians in the town are wide of the mark. “It’s more like 3,000,” he says. “When I first came here, you could come in the morning and find a house to rent. Now it takes two to three weeks to find somewhere. All the houses are full; the economy in the area is growing. We are paying taxes.”
: Dermot Tatlow for The Telegraph
He worked at the Fourth Street Foods factory for three years from 2020 to 2023, having been hired through Prospective Services, a third party contractor. Local news in Charleroi reported last week that Prospective Services, based in Charleroi, is being investigated by federal authorities for having “knowingly paid undocumented non-citizen employees with cash” and having “transported and housed undocumented non-citizens for employment purposes”.
It is claimed that authorities seized almost $1 million in cash from Prosperity. Fourth Street Foods has always insisted it only employs migrants legally entitled to be in the US and to work here. The company said it had provided federal investigators with documentation requested as part of its inquiry into Prosperity Services.
Mr Cherisme told The Telegraph he wasn’t working legally when first hired by Prosperity. “They knew I didn’t have any documents,” he says. “I wasn’t working legally when I first came here.” He was paid an initial $8 an hour, assembling 4,000 sandwiches each shift, working inside a refrigeration unit that required multiple layers of clothing. It was, he recalls, “back breaking work” that locals had not been prepared to do.
Newly arrived Haitians are reluctant to talk. They’re visible wandering the streets or else sat outside houses that don’t look big enough to accommodate so many people. A care home has been closed down and converted into migrant housing.
: Dermot Tatlow for The Telegraph
Donald Trump, insists Mr Cherisme, has stirred up hatred in his new home town. “White people didn’t have any problems with us until Trump said those things. The Americans don’t want to work at the food factory,” he says.
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