Former Donald Trump housekeeper Victorina Morales knew the danger in speaking out about her then-former boss. She could have been fired. She lacked permission to be in the U.S., so she could have faced retaliation and been deported. Maybe no one would believe her. But after she’d given his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club five years of her sweat and tears, she was angry about the way he talked about immigrants like her. “This is bad. This is not normal,” she says she thought, in a new interview with The Washington Post. “He is acting this way knowing that we are working for him inside.”
She has in no way been alone. In the year since she and Sandra Diaz, another former Trump housekeeper, bravely stepped forward to share their stories, The Washington Post reports that it “has spoken with 48 people who had worked illegally for the Trump Organization at 11 of its properties in Florida, New Jersey, New York and Virginia. These workers spent years—and in some cases nearly two decades—performing the manual labor that keeps Trump’s resorts clean and their visitors fed.”
These workers were so close to the Trump family that they cleaned the makeup off his shirt collars (“Bronx Colors-brand face makeup from Switzerland,” for the curious), yet Mr. I-Know-Everything has denied knowing anything about his company hiring undocumented workers. It’s an excuse he’s been using for decades, including when undocumented Polish workers who cleared the way for Trump Tower sued over unpaid wages. ”Trump said he had no idea about the illegal workers,” but Mr. I-Never-Settle eventually “settled the case for $1.38 million in 1998,” the Post writes.
It was when reporting began to reveal that undocumented employees were still working at Trump’s clubs well into his presidency that mass firings began, workers told TBS host Samantha Bee in September. “He got rid of us,” one said. “For what? So they wouldn’t catch him having illegal workers.” Some of these workers sought to speak to Trump face-to-face, even attending his State of the Union address earlier this year as guests of Democratic Congress members. Morales said she was “so honored” to be invited. “I am proud that I get to be there, honestly, and that I’ll get another chance to talk to members of Congress about our story. [To tell them] what it’s like to be here without papers and why we need immigration reform.”
They’re still bravely sharing their stories, and still fighting, as the Post reports: “This week, Morales and Diaz plan to attend town hall meetings of Democratic presidential candidates over three days in Las Vegas,” to continue making the case that all 11 million undocumented immigrants here need permanent protections. “The only thing we want is to have these rights like every person who lives here,” said Margarita Cruz, another former Trump worker. “To have insurance, to have benefits. And more than anything, to remove the fear—that at any moment we could be deported—from our lives.”