In attendance at President Trump’s scheduled State of the Union address will be one of his former employees, an illegal immigrant who was fired from the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster.
According to Fox News, Victorina Morales, the illegal immigrant from Guatemala fired from the golf club, was invited by Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ). She worked there as a housekeeper for five years.
“The woman, who’s an illegal immigrant, has since become an advocate for other illegal immigrants in the country,” reports Fox News. “She recently spoke out in the media about the Trump Organization’s hiring practices.”
Congresswoman Coleman recently denounced President Trump as a hypocrite for pushing border wall funding while having hired illegal immigrants at his golf club in the past.
“President Trump justified shutting the government down for five weeks by demonizing immigrants as the scourge of the country and the root of our nation’s crime and insecurity,” she said. “Meanwhile, CEO Trump led a company that has relied extensively on the hard work of undocumented immigrants like my constituent Victorina to keep his resorts clean and his putting greens trimmed. Donald Trump wants to build silly walls to stop the same immigrants that he’s made a career and a fortune from exploiting.”
“I hope that in his State of the Union address, Donald Trump will finally acknowledge the real face of immigrants in this country — women and children fleeing violence, law-abiding, tax-paying people who would do almost anything to be Americans,” Coleman continued. “And if he can’t, I’ve invited Victorina so that he may look her in her eyes to tell his lies to a familiar face.”
Speaking with NPR, Morales said that the Trump Organization knew about her status as an illegal immigrant and hired her anyway.
“They knew that I didn’t have documents, and the supervisor, Jorge, took my ID photo in the laundry room, and a cousin of his took me to a place to get fake documents,” she said. “He told me that I had to pay for them, and I said, sorry, but I don’t have money to pay for that. He told me not to worry about it, that he would cover it and I could pay it back.”
Victorina’s lawyer, Anibal Romero, told NPR that President Trump’s golf clubs employ “many, many” illegal immigrants.
Romero said: “When Victorina Morales came to my office in October, she said to me that there were many, many workers at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster who were undocumented, and many of them shared similar stories — that they were recruited, that they were coerced into doing work they didn’t want to do, that they were threatened with deportation.”
When Victorina’s story broke, Romero says she received “anonymous calls” from illegal immigrants with similar stories about working for the Trump National Golf Club.
“I started receiving anonymous calls from people who claimed they have worked for Donald Trump, who told me very similar stories,” she said. “That, you know, management knew that they weren’t legal, that they were not — they did not have health benefits. They didn’t have pension plans that were offered to other people, that there was a two-tiered system — the documented workers and the undocumented workers.”
The Trump Organization has since pledged to use the E-Verify system to ensure that everyone employed at the company is a legal U.S. citizen.