It seems like every rock The Washington Post turns over reveals more undocumented Trump Organization employees—and now a Post investigation finds that much of the work involving rocks at Trump properties was done by undocumented workers.
Mobile Payroll Construction is a Trump Organization property that sends a crew of workers around to Trump properties. They’ve built stone walls, chimneys, waterfalls, and more at multiple Trump properties—Jorge Castro, one of the undocumented workers, had worked at seven different ones—and they are part of a larger pattern: “Since January, The Post has interviewed 43 immigrants without legal status who were employed at Trump properties,” Joshua Partlow and David Fahrenthold write. “In all, at least eight Trump properties have employed immigrants who entered the United States illegally, some as far back as 19 years, The Post has found.”
And once again, these workers say that their Trump Organization employers knew about their undocumented status. “If you’re a good worker, papers don’t matter,” Castro told the Post. He’d provided a fake Social Security number at first, and then an Individual Tax Identification Number that was valid but is information that the IRS makes very clear is not proof of legal status. “It doesn’t even check one of the boxes,” according to the head of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Another worker says his boss not only told him to buy fake papers, but told him where to buy them.
These people were doing skilled and hard work without benefits, and a former worker on the crew said he now earns twice as much working for a unionized employer. So we’re not talking about jobs that no one else would have wanted—we’re talking about skilled work that Trump was having done on the cheap in part by hiring undocumented workers who were too vulnerable to press for the overtime pay and benefits they deserved.
It’s yet another perfect encapsulation of how little Trump cares about workers and how willing he is to exploit immigration for his own purposes … and as we’ve seen, his base doesn’t really care what a fraud he is.