Vance began to speak about Springfield in early July, bringing up the immigrants at a Senate Banking Committee hearing featuring Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell.

There, Vance mentioned Springfield as part of a line of questioning that sought to tie immigration to inflated housing costs across the country. He cited a letter that Springfield's city manager had sent to him and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) the day before, attributing a housing crisis in the city to an influx of over 15,000 Haitian immigrants.

Vance ratcheted up his rhetoric the following day at the National Conservatism conference. On stage at that event, Vance let loose a stream of inflammatory statements, accusing "illegals" of having "overwhelmed" the city.

Other Republicans, including Bernie Moreno, who is running for Ohio's other Senate seat, also framed the situation in Springfield as an "an insane demographic change" that was straining resources. But Carl Ruby, an immigrant advocate and senior pastor at Central Christian Church in Springfield, said it was Vance who did the most to drag the town into the spotlight.

"The sad thing is none of this was stirred up until JD Vance started publicizing it," Ruby told TPM. "It was an internal thing that we were handling and handling well." According to Ruby, even after the death of a young boy named Aiden Clark last year in a crash for which a Haitian immigrant was found liable, tensions in the city remained manageable. However, the political attacks set off a summer of increasing misery.

The outpouring of anger that has overwhelmed Clark's father and his city has included neo-Nazis and other white supremacists. On Aug. 10, about a dozen members of one such group, Blood Tribe, showed up in Springfield for one of their trademark events, which involve masked marches where participants wave swastika flags. At least two of the marchers who descended on Springfield's downtown carried rifles.

Blood Tribe, which is led by a former Marine and tattoo artist named Christopher "Hammer" Pohlhaus, has staged similar marches around the country. The neo-Nazi group's march in Springfield was led by a top associate of Pohlhaus', Drake Berentz. During the Springfield march, Berentz made remarks where he referenced the child killed in the car crash and suggested the city had been taken over by "degenerate third worlders." Berentz, who uttered racial slurs and suggested Jews were behind the migrant influx, issued a call to action for people who "are tired of having to share space."

"No longer do outsiders have to take your resources," Berentz said. "No longer do you have to suffer the abuse of subhumans."

Ruby, the pastor and immigrant advocate in Springfield, said the neo-Nazi march took the negative attention on the city to the next level. "It changed what was a local conversation pretty quickly into a national conversation," Ruby said.