Donald Trump is claiming that he knows nothing about the fact that his numerous golf resorts and Virginia winery have employed undocumented workers, but during a 2013 Trump Tower meeting with a group of Dreamers who were sharing their stories in a tour across the country, he admitted quite the opposite. In fact, he sang his workers’ praises.
"’You know, the truth is I have a lot of illegals working for me in Miami,’ he told them, using the term for undocumented immigrants those in the meeting found offensive,” BuzzFeed News reported in August 2015. Gaby Pacheco, a Dreamer and immigrant rights advocate from Florida, recalled Trump saying that "’You know in Miami, my golf course is tended by all these Hispanics—if it wasn't for them my lawn wouldn't be the lawn it is; it's the best lawn.”
Quite a difference from July 2019 Trump, who, when asked if he’s ever employed undocumented immigrants, said “Well, that I don’t know. Because I don’t run it. But I would say this, probably every club in the United States has that, because it seems to me, from what I understand, a way that people did business.” Note the use of past tense here, when one of his former housekeepers, Sandra Diaz, said she knows of at least half a dozen undocumented workers who are still employed at his winery.
While Diaz has since gained legal status after working for Trump, her coworker Victorina Morales is still undocumented, and described working so closely to Trump that last year she “was given a certificate from the White House Communications Agency inscribed with her name,” The New York Times reported. “Her husband has confirmed that she would on occasion come home jubilant because the club owner had paid her a compliment, or bestowed on her a $50 or sometimes a $100 tip.”
Back in 2013, Trump reportedly told the excited Dreamers that "You've convinced me” on immigration. But this is a man who basically says whatever he thinks the crowd in front of him wants to hear, and now six years later is saying he knows nothing about the workers he praised himself six years before. “Ah. So in fact Trump has known about his company's hiring practices,” tweeted Mario Carrillo of immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice. “A bigger hypocrite and liar do not exist than Donald Trump.”
