Immigrants Rebuilt a Pennsylvania Town — Then Became Targets
Haitians in Charleroi filled pews and revived stores. Now they face deportation and backlash.
Larry Celaschi summons me to look at his cell phone, which displays a photo of a truck. The picture, which someone shared with Celaschi, features the awkward angle and hazy resolution of amateur surveillance. It depicts Black people loading a U-Haul with household belongings.
We are standing on the sidewalk near the McDonald’s on McKean Avenue in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, a small town on the Monongahela River, about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. Charleroi, with a population around 4,200, is the sort of insular place that might once have seemed far removed from national politics. But one consequence of the Donald Trump era is that the president’s animus bears down on distant corners of the earth in a political butterfly effect: Trump billows in Tucson, Arizona in September. Eight months later, Haitian immigrants load a U-Haul in the Monongahela Valley.