Police in Dayton, Ohio, have said there is no evidence that immigrants are eating pets, calling new allegations that emerged online on Saturday “irresponsible.” 

The police statement was issued hours after a new video and article alleged African immigrants in Dayton were seen preparing to grill dead cats. The claim was shared by Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice presidential nominee, Donald Trump Jr., and others on X.

Dayton Police Chief Kamran Afzal said in a statement, “We stand by our immigrant community and there is no evidence to even remotely suggest that any group, including our immigrant community, is engaged in eating pets. Seeing politicians or other individuals use outlandish information to appeal to their constituents is disheartening.” 

The new claim followed baseless allegations that Haitian immigrants were abducting and eating pets in Springfield, a city less than 30 miles from Dayton. Former President Donald Trump repeated the claim in Tuesday night’s debate, despite city officials saying there was no evidence of this happening. 

On Saturday, Vance doubled down on the claims that immigrants were eating pets, sharing the new allegation on X. 

“Kamala Harris and her media apparatchiks should be ashamed of themselves,” Vance wrote. “Another ‘debunked’ story that turned out to have merit.”

New claim 

Christopher Rufo, a conservative writer and activist published the new claim on Substack and the allegations are based on a video originally posted to social media in August 2023. 

CBS News confirmed the original video was first posted to social media in August 2023 by a man who lives in Dayton, Ohio. CBS News reached out to the man for comment but did not hear back on Saturday afternoon.

The video shows what appears to be animal carcasses on a grill. The man filming the footage alleges, without evidence, that they are cats. 

“What is this they got on the grill?” the man says in the video. When two cats appear near the grill, the man jokes that the cats “better get missing — looks like his homey’s on the grill!” 

Rufo said he spoke to the man who filmed the video, and the man believes the carcasses were cats. Rufo said he worked on the story with IM-1776, an online magazine, and one of their reporters visited the building where the incident was alleged to have happened. The reporter spoke to neighbors, who said that African immigrants lived in the building. Neighbors told the reporter they believed the people who owned the grill were also African immigrants, although the residents’ origin or identity wasn’t verified by CBS News.

The new allegation also prompted backlash and skepticism, with many users saying the carcasses look more like chickens. CBS News has reached out to veterinary experts for their opinion on what type of carcass is on the grill. 

Dayton Mayor Jeffrey J. Mims, Jr. also issued a statement, calling the claim “totally false and dangerously irresponsible of politicians aiming to sow division and fear.” Mims said there had been “absolutely zero reports of this type of activity.”

The Polaris Dawn crew closed out a record-setting commercial spaceflight and packed up Saturday for re-entry and a pre-dawn splashdown early Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico northwest of Key West, Florida.

Flying along a southwest-to-northeast trajectory, the Crew Dragon capsule, carrying billionaire Jared Isaacman, pilot Scott Poteet and company engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis, is expected to fire its braking rockets at 2:40 a.m. EDT Sunday to drop out of orbit.

Plunging back into the discernible atmosphere, the Crew Dragon’s protective heat shield will endure temperatures as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit before the ship slows enough to deploy its parachutes. Splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico near Dry Tortugas, Florida, is expected around 3:36 a.m.

A SpaceX recovery ship is stationed nearby to recover the capsule and help the crew members out of the spacecraft for routine post-landing medical checks before a helicopter flight to shore and reunions with family and friends.

The Polaris Dawn mission, financed by Isaacman, in cooperation with SpaceX, was launched from the Kennedy Space Center atop a Falcon 9 rocket early Tuesday. Right off the bat, the crew set a new altitude record for a piloted spacecraft in Earth orbit, reaching a high point, or apogee, of 875 miles.

That’s farther from Earth than anyone has flown since the final Apollo voyage to the moon in 1972.

Early Thursday, the crew set another record when Isaacman and Gillis took turns floating just outside the capsule’s hatch in the first non-government spacewalk ever conducted.

“Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world,” Isaacman marveled, taking in a spectacular view of the borderless planet below as he floated through the Crew Dragon’s hatch.

The goal of the brief excursions was to test the SpaceX-designed pressure suits in the harsh environment of space, assessing their mobility and checking the motion of wrist, elbow and shoulder joints to help engineers design improved versions for future flights to the moon and, eventually, Mars.

Along with a full slate of biomedical research, the crew also tested laser communications technology linking the Crew Dragon to the Starlink constellation of commercial internet relay satellites.

“Early this morning via @Starlink space lasers, the Polaris Dawn crew chatted with SpaceX teams over coffee and donuts,” SpaceX posted on X Saturday. “During the 40+ minute uninterrupted video call, Dragon completed half an orbit over the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S., cutting southeast over the Atlantic Ocean and rounding the Cape of Good Hope.”

Earlier in the mission, Gillis, an accomplished violist, participated in what amounted to an international concert, performing composer John Williams’ “Star Wars” song “Rey’s Theme,” accompanied by young musicians in the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Sweden and Uganda.

The Polaris Dawn mission is the first of three planned by Isaacman, an entrepreneur and philanthropist, in cooperation with Musk.

The second flight will be another Crew Dragon mission while the third will be the first piloted flight of SpaceX’s huge Super Heavy-Starship rocket, now under development in Texas.

It’s not known how much Isaacman is paying for the flights or how much SpaceX funded on its own.

Polaris Dawn is SpaceX’s fifth commercial Crew Dragon flight to orbit and its 14th including NASA missions carrying crew members to the International Space Station. The California rocket builder has now launched 54 men and women to orbit since piloted flights began in May 2020.

Three American citizens, two Spaniards and a Czech citizen have been detained in Venezuela on suspicion of plotting to destabilize the country through “violent actions,” the government said Saturday, adding that hundreds of weapons had been seized.

Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said that the five were held on suspicion of planning an attack on President Nicolas Maduro and his government. The arrests come amid heightened tensions between Venezuela and both the U.S. and Spain over Venezuela’s disputed July 28 presidential election, which the country’s opposition accuses Maduro of stealing.

Maduro, a former bus driver, who succeeded iconic left-wing leader Hugo Chavez on his death in 2013, insists he won a third term but failed to release detailed voting tallies to back his claim.

“We know that the United States government has links to this operation,” Cabello asserted. He said the two Spaniards were recently detained in Puerto Ayacucho in the southwest.

He added that three Americans and a Czech national were also arrested and linked the alleged plot to intelligence agencies in the United States and Spain as well as to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado.

An American Navy sailor was detained in Venezuela last week while visiting the country on personal travel, several U.S. officials confirmed to CBS News. The enlisted sailor is a petty officer first class and formerly a Navy SEAL who was assigned to a West Coast team, several U.S. officials and a senior Defense Department official told CBS News. It is not clear if the sailor was one of the three Americans confirmed detained on Saturday.

“They contacted French mercenaries, they contacted mercenaries from Eastern Europe and they are in an operation to try to attack our country,” he said.

He added that “more than 400 rifles were seized” and accused the detainees of plotting “terrorist acts.”

The United States, Spain and the Czech Republic had yet to react to the sensational claims, which come amid a deepening standoff between Maduro and Western powers. A plane belonging to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was seized by the U.S. and brought to Florida, the Justice Department said, claiming the jet was exported from Florida in violation of U.S. sanctions.

Tensions between Caracas and former colonial power Spain rose sharply after Venezuelan opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, 75, went into exile in Spain a week ago, after being threatened with arrest.

Earlier this week Caracas recalled its ambassador to Madrid for consultations and summoned Spain’s envoy to Venezuela for talks after a Spanish minister accused Maduro of running a “dictatorship.” Venezuela was also angered by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s decision to meet with Gonzalez Urrutia and warned Spain against any “interference” in its affairs.

Caracas has additionally been engaged in a war of words with the United States, which recognized Gonzalez Urrutia as the winner of the election. Washington on Thursday announced new sanctions against 16 Venezuelan officials, including some from the electoral authority, for impeding “a transparent electoral process” and not publishing accurate results.

Venezuela denounced the measures as a “crime of aggression” and Maduro decorated four military officers among those targeted by the sanctions. Maduro’s claim to have won a third term in office sparked mass opposition protests, which claimed at least 27 lives and left 192 people wounded.

The opposition published polling station-level results, which it said showed Gonzalez Urrutia winning by a landslide. About 2,400 people, including numerous teens, were arrested in the unrest. After Venezuela’s last election, in 2018, Maduro also claimed victory amid widespread accusations of fraud. With the support of the military and other institutions, he managed to cling to power despite international sanctions.

Maduro’s tenure since 2013 has seen GDP drop 80 percent in a decade, prompting more than seven million of the country’s 30 million citizens to migrate.

contributed to this report.