The inconsistency was uncovered by The New York Times report in December 2018. The Trump National Golf Club of Bedminster, owned by President Donald Trump, had undocumented Latin American immigrants working as housekeepers.
Three days ago, the president’s son, Eric Trump, not only confirmed this but also assured The Washington Post that at least 18 undocumented workers had been laid off from five of his own golf courts, in New York and New Jersey, over the past two months.
“My name is Margarita Cruz. I’m Mexican, from the state of Puebla. I started working at Trump National about eight years ago. My job was housekeeping. We had to clean the clubhouse, the pool. In general, I felt comfortable because you get used to people, to your companions, friends,” this woman said to the Post when she had just been fired, in a previous report, which counted ten lay offs.
Eric Trump confirmed to WP that instead of ten they fired eleven of these undocumented workers from the Trump National Golf Club of New York, amidst the Government shutdown.
“There have also been firings at the Trump course in Bedminster, N.J., which his son did not address,” correspondents Joshua Partlow and David A. Fahrenthold wrote.
The article points out that former employees of the organization say the number of undocumented people working in these golf courts “is probably larger than the firing reflect,” because work in seasonal. “Maintenance and other employees often leave their jobs in late fall and return when the courses reopen in the spring, leaving only a fraction of employees to work through the winter.”
CNN, for its part, reported on the meeting Margarita Cruz, Victorina Morales and Gabriel Sedano held with Democrat Senator Robert Menendez. Cruz, Morales and Sedano worked for years without documents in the Trump golf courses and were fired during this razzia. At the meeting, they called for an investigation into the hiring practices of the Trump organization.
Victorina Morales was on the list of attendees to last Tuesday’s State of the Union speech Donald Trump addressed.
The Washington Post and CNN mentioned the case of Juan Quintero, who, although undocumented, worked at New York’s Trump National Golf Club Hudson Valley for eighteen years. He was recently fired.
Al Día News published a NJ.com video with a testimony from Sandra Díaz, who is not among the recent laid offs, but who confirms that she worked for three years in the Bedminster court as a housekeeper. “I cleaned his house, his sister house and all the houses. He knows me, he knows my name, because always I had to go inside and did whatever I had to do in his house.”
The Trump Organization defended itself by saying that these workers “presented false documents” at the time the organization hired them. And in a statement to CNN, they said they would institute digital verification of all properties “and continue to take swift and appropriate action where necessary.”
Photo credits: Wikipedia