Former President Donald Trump made the unsubstantiated claim during Tuesday’s presidential debate that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating dogs and other pets.

“They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump said in response to a question about immigration. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a disgrace.”

Trump’s response was one of the most extraordinary of the debate’s first 30 minutes: a former U.S. president spreading an internet rumor — one that some of his critics have labeled racist — in front of an audience of millions of Americans. The comment illustrated the proliferation of misinformation in today’s media ecosystem.

ABC News host David Muir, who co-moderated the debate, immediately checked Trump’s claims. He said the city manager of Springfield, Ohio, had told the network that there had been no credible reports of pets being abused, injured or mistreated by people from the city’s immigrant community.

For days, unsubstantiated rumors have been circulating on social media that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are kidnapping and eating pets. Most of the rumors have centered around Springfield, a city with a large Haitian immigrant population, but police there issued a statement Monday denying the stories and saying they had seen no documented instances.

“There are no credible reports or specific allegations that pets have been abused, injured or mistreated by individuals within the immigrant community,” police said in a statement.

Republicans, including Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice presidential nominee, have pointed to the claims as evidence that immigrants are causing chaos. However, Vance, in a statement about X earlier Tuesday, hedged his bets, saying, “It is, of course, possible that all of these rumors turn out to be untrue.”

The claims about pets were based in part on vague social media posts, including a fourth-hand account in a Facebook group focused on local crime, and statements at public meetings where residents spoke about violence against animals without providing evidence.

Springfield Mayor Rob Rue reiterated Tuesday that there are no documented cases of immigrants eating pets in the city.

“Rumors like this distract from the real issues, such as housing concerns, the resources needed for our schools and our overburdened health care system,” he said during a city commission meeting.

Rue said an alleged case of someone attacking a cat — falsely attributed to a Haitian immigrant in Springfield — actually happened 160 miles away in Canton, Ohio. And the suspect charged with animal cruelty there has no known connection to Haiti, the Canton Repository newspaper reported.

The topic of immigration was at the center of Tuesday’s Springfield City Commission meeting. During the meeting, resident Nathan Clark, whose 11-year-old son was killed last year when a minivan driven by a Haitian immigrant struck his school bus, lambasted Republican politicians who he said were using his late son Aiden as “a political tool” to stoke anti-immigrant hatred.

Immigration is a powerful issue in the presidential face. In an NBC News poll in April, 22 percent of voters named immigration and the border as the most important issue facing the country, behind inflation and the cost of living at 23 percent.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby condemned the claims about Haitians in Ohio as a dangerous conspiracy theory that could lead to anti-immigrant violence.

“There are going to be people who believe it, no matter how ridiculous and stupid it is, and they might act on that kind of information and react in a way that could get someone hurt,” Kirby told reporters Tuesday.