President Donald Trump’s relentlessly harsh immigration policy came back to bite him in a new way when undocumented immigrants who’ve worked at his businesses outed themselves. Now, no doubt at least partially in light of the harsh stance towards undocumented immigration that Trump himself has taken, some of those immigrants have asked Congressional Democrats including Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.) and Robert Menendez (N.J.) and Reps. Raul Grijalva (Ariz.) and Tom Malinowski (N.J.) for protection from immigration enforcement authorities.
Menendez told reporters that he’d “raise concerns” with relevant federal agencies to try and keep them from being “negatively” affected.
He added:
‘[The workers] really speak volumes about the hypocrisy of the president who rails against immigrants but uses their labor and does so in a way, and an in an environment, as I understand it, that was hostile to them and threatening to them.’
Indeed — in some of the initial reporting on these workers, they shared stories of incessant abuse on the job at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, where he’s even spent a lot of time as president. Their supervisors held an extra amount of sway over them because in some cases, they actively helped the immigrants evade the law and work without documentation. Former Bedminster golf club employee Victorina Morales claims management even took a photo for her fake documents in a laundry room on the premises.
Since these deeply ironic stories have been coming out, the workers’ positions have become at least somewhat more precarious because many of them have been fired. A dozen undocumented immigrant employees were dismissed just from the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester, New York.
One of those let go was Gabriel Sedano, who began working for the Westchester club all the way back in 2005. He shared:
‘It seemed unjust that they just call you and they fire you when they knew we were good workers.’
Protection isn’t where their team wants to stop — they’re also seeking a Congressional investigation, which might actually be more likely now that Democrats are the majority in the House. Lawyer David Leopold — who accompanied the undocumented immigrants to Capitol Hill this week — went so far as to insist that removing the workers in question from the United States would amount to obstruction of justice, which ironically enough the Trump team has long been accused of being fond of.
Lawyer Anibal Romero, who’s directly representing about 20 current and former undocumented Trump employees, added:
‘It isn’t illegal to work in the US, but it is illegal to knowingly hire undocumented immigrants and then [for] supervisors to physically assault them, threaten them with deportation. We need a complete, thorough investigation.’
Meanwhile, the man at the center of it all — Donald Trump — has only dug further into his anti-immigrant rhetoric. Besides shutting down the government for over a month because he didn’t get the over $5 billion he wanted for a border wall, he’s gone so far into his ideology that the other day he claimed there are actually over 25 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. — and no one really has any idea where he got that number from.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
