JD Vance has spent the better part of two weeks now spreading racist lies about Haitian immigrants in his home state of Ohio—refusing to let truth, decency, or even the security of a town just 53 miles away from where he grew up get in the way. So why stop now? Asked during a North Carolina rally Wednesday if he and Donald Trump would try to deport Haitians living in Springfield, Ohio, even though most are in the country legally, the vice presidential candidate quadruple-downed on his hate campaign, boasting that he would continue to slur Haitians as “illegal aliens” and falsely claiming that the Biden administration “[waved] a wand…to say we’re not going to deport those people here.” Vance told Politico’s Mia McCarthy from the stage, “An illegal action from Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works.”

It’s not clear what, exactly, Vance believes is “illegal” about the Biden administration granting and extending Temporary Protected Status to allow Haitians legal entry into the United States—beyond the fact that he wants to keep casting them as a threat to his constituents, rather than more constituents he ought to be serving. “Who in this room, who is this country consented to allowing millions of aliens to come into this country unchecked, unvetted?” he said in Raleigh. “None of us did.”

Vance began his attacks on Haitians in Springfield last week, when he amplified a false social media conspiracy theory that immigrants in the small Ohio city were eating pets. As the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, Springfield’s city manager, Bryan Heck, had explicitly told Vance's team there was no truth to the rumor on September 9: “I told them these claims were baseless.” But Vance spread them anyway, and Trump parroted them during a wild debate stage rant on September 10. “They’re eating the dogs,” the former president claimed. “They’re eating the cats. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Informed that the lie had already been debunked, Trump insisted it was true because he heard it from “the people on television.”

The episode was absurd, but there are real consequences to these lies: Springfield has been inundated with dozens of bomb threats since Trump and Vance promoted the hoax, forcing the evacuation of schools, grocery stores, and health clinics—and putting a target on the Haitian community there, with some expressing fear of sending their children to school. Trump refused to denounce those threats, and Vance shrugged them off: “All that I’ve done is surface the complaints of my constituents, people who are suffering because of Kamala Harris’s policies,” he said in a contentious CNN interview last weekend.

One problem with those “complaints,” though: They’re bogus. Erika Lee, the woman behind a Facebook post that helped ignite the right-wing conspiracy meme, has admitted she had no proof, deleted the post, and expressed regret. “With all this chaos that has gone on,” she told the New York Times, “I hate myself for making that post.” Vance’s team has pointed to another woman, Anna Kilgore, who said her cat went missing in late August, to back up his claims. But when a Wall Street Journal reporter went to Kilgore’s house, the cat was alive and well: Miss Sassy had returned a few days later, the Journal reported, and Kilgore said she’d apologized to her Haitian neighbors.

Don’t expect any apologies, though, from Vance or Trump, whose contempt for Haitians seems to be long-held—“Why do we want people from Haiti here?” he asked during an infamous Oval Office episode in 2018, describing Haiti as a “shithole” country—and continued to bully Springfield from the rally stage in New York on Wednesday. “You know what?” he said, vowing to visit the city in Ohio despite its mayor urging him not to. “They’ve got to get much tougher.”