Jack Buhring voted for Donald Trump for the first time in 2024. A little over a year later, his truck struck and killed a 20-year-old Haitian man on a road near Springfield, Ohio — and he says the death has not left his mind since.
“I feel guilty,” the trucker told The Atlantic, in an interview surfaced this weekend by Raw Story.
The experience has turned him against the president he helped elect: he now calls the administration “a joke,” though he says he holds no warmer view of Democrats. It is one first-time voter’s private reckoning with a human cost he never imagined when he cast his ballot — and, for Springfield’s Haitians, a mirror of their own.
The young man was Pierre Damas Bel, a college student who stepped into the road in front of Buhring’s truck on August 31, in what his family and friends have described as a suicide. His death was ruled a suicide, and investigators found the trucker was not at fault, but Buhring says he cannot shake it. “I feel really bad for the family,” he said, and he has since tried to learn everything he can about the young man he could not avoid.
Bel’s death cannot be separated from the policy that shadowed his final weeks. He had held Temporary Protected Status — the humanitarian protection that let him live and study legally in the United States — until he became one of thousands of Haitians stripped of it after the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end the designation. In the weeks before he died, his family told CNN and NPR that he had been made to wear an ICE ankle monitor and felt humiliated by it.
For Springfield’s Haitians, Bel’s death landed in the middle of fear that had already emptied the streets.
When The Atlantic visited in early September, much of the Haitian community was in hiding: families had food delivered to their homes, and worshippers attended church online rather than risk the drive. Haitian activists told the magazine that some residents had spoken of suicide as preferable to deportation, a measure of how heavily the end of TPS has fallen on people who had built lives, raised children and gone to school here.
At the vigils for Bel, as reported by Rawstory, the mourners were a portrait of the life he had made in Ohio: his high-school teachers, his soccer coaches and teammates, co-workers from a local Texas Roadhouse, and neighbors. One man told a crowd that Bel’s death was “a failing of broader policy, but I will always bear the guilt that there is more that I could have done and we could have done.” Hundreds later gathered for his funeral in Springfield.
The response has rippled beyond the city. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an immigration attorney, called The Atlantic’s account “searing” and wrote on X that he felt “very sorry for Mr. Buhring, who became an unintentional victim” of the administration’s campaign against Springfield’s Haitians, a campaign whose toll, he said, “keeps growing worse.”
Springfield, a city of roughly 15,000 Haitian residents, became a national flashpoint in 2024 after false and racist claims about its Haitian community. The end of TPS this summer turned that rhetoric into consequence: lost work permits, the threat of removal to a country the U.S. government itself warns is too dangerous to visit, and, for families across the city, a daily calculus of fear.
If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day by call or text at 988.
Sources: The Atlantic (original reporting and interview with Jack Buhring), as surfaced by Raw Story (reporting by Robert Davis); CNN and NPR (reporting on Pierre Damas Bel’s death, his loss of Temporary Protected Status, and his family’s account of the ICE ankle monitor); the Springfield News-Sun (funeral coverage); and a public statement by immigration attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. Quotations are credited to the outlets and speakers who reported them.
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