As President Trump sends troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to “defend” (white) America against the caravans of Brown people and bar some from asylum in the U.S., the history of hiring undocumented workers at his properties in New Jersey and Florida continues to come to light.
Trump has a problem with undocumented immigrants seeking asylum, but not when they are hired to wash his clothes or make his bed.
The Trump administration is creating a narrative that refugees escaping violence and poverty in Central America and seeking asylum are dangerous.
Victorina Morales, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala, reportedly crossed the border in 1999 and has worked at the at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J, since 2013, The New York Times reported Thursday.
According to a spokesperson for his business organization, she would be one of tens of thousands of people to be employed by Trump, and would be terminated if she was undocumented. Sandra Diaz, 46, from Costa Rica was another.
Both Morales and Diaz, during their stints, washed the Trump family’s clothes in a special detergent, made beds and dusted.
“There are many people without papers,” said Ms. Diaz, who said she witnessed several people being hired whom she knew to be undocumented.
Morales was initially pleased with her job because she was paid and tipped well, often times by Trump. But her sentiments changed when he ran for president.
“I’m tired of being humiliated and treated like a stupid person,” she said in Spanish during a brief interview. “We’re just immigrants who don’t have papers.”
During his campaign in 2016, when he referred to Mexicans as rapists and criminals, he promised to mandate E-Verify, a federal tool to verify employment eligibility, and requested $23 million in his 2019 budget proposal to expand the program for nationwide use. He also bragged when a new Trump hotel opened in Washington, “We didn’t have one illegal immigrant on the job.”
“The president has been half-serious about stopping illegal immigration by not taking away the jobs magnet,” said Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a group pushing to reduce immigration. Beck said Trump has “let us down in his promise to help American workers” because he hasn’t “put his shoulder behind a mandatory E-Verify bill.”
Trump signed a “Buy American, Hire American” executive order in 2017 restricting visas, but his Mar-a-Lago golf club also has a history of applying for H-2B visas for hundreds of immigrant workers. The H-2B visa is for “temporary non-agricultural workers.”
Morales reports being driven to work by staff to hide the fact that she couldn’t legally drive, and that after she presented fake papers for work, she was given another set of fake papers by the Trump Organization to keep her employed there.
Morales had a front row seat on the job to Trump meetings as she was cleaning his villa, even when potential cabinet members were interviewed and when he met with the White House chief of staff.
But that didn’t come without experiencing verbal abuse from Trump’s staff.
Her attorney Anibal Romero said in a statement Thursday that his clients were called racial epithets and threatened with deportation by a supervisor that ironically, “had employed them despite knowing their undocumented status and even provided them with forged documents.”
“We are tired of the abuse, the insults, the way he talks about us when he knows that we are here helping him make money,” she told the NY Times. “We sweat it out to attend to his every need and have to put up with his humiliation.”
Reader Question: Do we need any more proof that he’s a liar about everything
