An old nude photo shoot, revived this weekend by the New York Post, has raised a lot of eyebrows, and not just for the amount of skin exposed. The model is the now-Mrs. Trump, and the existence of the photos—shot in 1995—reveals some gaps in Melania Trump's immigration story, suggesting that she might have been working in the United States without authorization.
While Trump and her husband, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, have said she came to the United States legally, her own statements suggest she first came to the country on a short-term visa that would not have authorized her to work as a model. Trump has also said she came to New York in 1996, but the nude photo shoot places her in the United States in 1995, as does a biography published in February by Slovenian journalists. […]
In a January profile in Harper’s Bazaar, Trump said she would return home from New York to renew her visa every few months. [...]
In a February interview with Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Trump repeated that characterization of her early years in the United States. “… I had visa. I travel every few months back to the country to Slovenia to stamp the visa. I came back. I applied for the green card. I applied for the citizenship later on.”
Here's the thing: if you have a work visa—an H-1B—you don't have to keep going back to your home country every few months to renew it. It can be valid for three years and extended all the way up to six years. Repeated trips back to Slovenia to renew a visa suggests that she was here on a tourist visa, and you can't legally work here with one of those. This might constitute visa fraud, says Andrew Greenfield, a partner at the Washington office of Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy, which specializes in immigration law. "If you enter the United States with the intention of working without authorization and you present yourself to a border agent at an airport or a seaport or a manned border and request a visa, even if there is not a Q&A—knowing that you are coming to work—you are implicitly, if not explicitly, manifesting that you intend to comply with the parameters of the visa classification for which you sought entry and were granted entry," he told Politico. There are a few exceptions. People working as domestic help for visiting families can come in on tourist visas in their capacity of nannies or whatever and continue working. That wasn't her.
Even if she were here on an H-1B, Politico points out, that would be a bit of a contradiction for her husband's campaign. Back in March, Trump said he would "end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions." Well, one exception. Marriage to him.
Wednesday, Sep 14, 2016 · 7:45:38 PM +00:00
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Joan McCarter
So much for the NYPost’s reporting. They got their dates wrong.
Photos taken of Trump in Manhattan in the mid-1990s for the French magazine Max were printed in a February 1997 issue of the magazine, not the January 1996 issue, as the New York Post reported in July, the photographer confirmed to TPM Wednesday.
The dates of the issue and the photoshoot were important, because they were used as evidence that Trump was living and working in the United States as early as 1995, which contradicted her account of when she immigrated to America.