OUT OF THE SHADOWS
Two housekeepers took on the president and revealed his company employed undocumented immigrants
JOSHUA PARTLOW AND DAVID A. FAHRENTHOLD
BEDMINSTER TOWNSHIP, N.J. It was important for Sandra Diaz to be invisible.
Before entering the Trump family villa, she would tie back her hair, pull on latex gloves and step into paper shoe coverings. She knew not to wear perfume that might leave the faintest trace of her presence.
As Donald Trump’s personal maid, Diaz was dealing with a fussy celebrity owner who presided like a monarch over Trump National Golf Club Bedminster long before he was elevated to U.S. president. She was an immigrant from Costa Rica working illegally for Trump with a fake Social Security card she had bought for US$50. Being invisible was her life’s work.
Moving quickly through the two-storey house in the mornings, Diaz carried out Trump’s fastidious instructions. In his closet, she would hang six sets of identical golf outfits: six white polo shirts, six pairs of beige pants, six neatly ironed pairs of boxer shorts. She would smear a dollop of Trump’s liquid face makeup on the back of her hand to make sure it hadn’t dried out.
The years of service that Diaz and other undocumented immigrant housekeepers, cooks, landscapers, greenskeepers, waiters, bellhops, farm hands and caddies devoted to the Trump Organization have given them a remarkable vantage point into the unvarnished lives of the now-first family.
Their recollections also show how Trump’s entrance into presidential politics — denouncing illegal immigrants as criminals and job-stealers — upended their lives and prompted some of them to confront their former boss publicly.
Over the past year, The Washington Post 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 performing the manual labour that keeps Trump’s resorts clean and their visitors fed.
This story is based on interviews with these workers, many of whom were fired or walked away from
their jobs after media reports about their employment.
The Post verified workers’ employment histories by reviewing pay stubs and tax documents and, when possible, corroborating accounts with their colleagues. The workers uniformly contend that their managers were aware of their undocumented status, a topic they said came up during conversations and workplace disputes.
Trump, who still owns the Trump Organization but has left day-today control to his eldest sons, has said he does not know whether it employs undocumented workers.
“Well, that I don’t know. Because I don’t run it,” he told reporters in July. “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.”
The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.
For decades, and well into Trump’s presidency, undocumented immigrants lived as Trump’s shadow family — ever present, if rarely considered. Trump had met many of them. There were three questions nearly every immigrant who worked for him was asked as Trump strolled the grounds of his resorts and golf clubs inspecting their work. “Your name. How much time you’d been there. And if you like it,” said Margarita Cruz, a housekeeper. This banter often ended with Trump pulling out US$50 or US$100 bills for tips.
This transactional relationship of discreet service for long hours and often low pay began to evolve as Trump entered politics on the promise to keep out the upward-striving immigrant workers who crumbed his table and scoured his toilets.
When Trump referred to some Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, when he vowed to wall off the U.s.-mexico border to prevent an immigrant “invasion,” the worry and anger began to build in the kitchens and laundry rooms of his properties.
So one day, Diaz, along with Victorina Morales, her successor as Trump’s housekeeper at Bedminster, decided to be seen.
When they spoke in articles in The New York Times and other publications beginning last December, it was not for money or really for politics, they said, but to highlight what they consider a glaring hypocrisy.
Trump, despite his rhetoric, had long employed undocumented immigrants, and they were the living proof.
A year later, Diaz and Morales no longer work for Trump. No one is known to have been deported because of the women’s actions. But the two have endured the anger of friends and colleagues who say they have betrayed a code of silence that permeates the nation’s underground economy.
They say it was worth it.
“How can you know something so big — how someone who goes on national television and says something — and you know it’s not true?” Diaz explained. “Whether it’s the president or not, you have the responsibility to say no. To pass through this barrier of fear and say no.”
Trump and his family spent so much time at their properties that many Trump Organization employees have stories about encounters with them.
Apparently, Trump loved Tic Tacs and demanded that there be two full containers of white Tic Tacs and one container that was half full in his bedroom bureau at all times. The same rule applied to the Bronx Colors-brand face makeup that Trump slathered on — two full containers, one half full — even if it meant the housekeepers had to bring new shirts from the pro shop because of the orange stains on the collars.
Donald Trump also liked Irish Spring soap in his shower. But his housekeepers quickly learned not to throw out his soap even if it had worn down to the tiniest sliver: Trump decided when he wanted something discarded. When that happened, with clothes or newspapers, he would toss them on the floor.
Diaz and Morales said a regular recipient of Trump’s castoff clothing was Melania’s father, Viktor Knavs.
Knavs and his wife, Amalija, were favourites of the Bedminster staff. Amalija would often cook breakfast in the villa for Melania while Trump regularly ate breakfast in the clubhouse.
One day in 2013, Viktor went out to play golf wearing one of Trump’s discarded red baseball caps. When Trump spotted him on the fairway, he blew up, and ordered his fatherin-law, in front of other golfers, to remove the hat and get off the course. Diaz and Morales were in the villa when Viktor returned, threw the hat on the ground and cursed Trump.
“Nobody could wear the red hat but (Trump),” Diaz said. “(Viktor) was very embarrassed,” Morales added.
Even before Trump became commander-in-chief, his arrival at one of his clubs prompted a flurry of activity. “GG-7” was the code word among employees for his arrival at his golf club in Westchester County, N.Y., after one of his old licence plates. “That means Trump’s coming up,” recalled Gabriel Juarez, the former head waiter. “Everyone was scared. Here comes the boss.”
On election night in 2016 at Trump International Hotel Washington, a jubilant American chef told Wendy Reyes, an immigrant pastry chef, “We are winning!” Reyes felt dismay.
“You’re not going to have that same smile when you come into the restaurant and you see that nobody’s working here because Trump has thrown us all out of the country,” she said she responded.
For many of Trump’s Latin American employees, this sense of discomfort grew over time as the newly elected president’s divisive politics seeped into the culture at his resorts. Many charities and non-profit organizations that regularly held events at his properties began to go elsewhere, while conservative groups and causes moved in.
These changes alarmed many undocumented employees. They worried about giving their real names and fake documents to government employees. At Bedminster, politics intruded in bizarre ways. Housekeepers began noticing anti-trump messaging popping up around the club. Insults were scrawled on the mirrors of the men’s locker-room.
On the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, an activist art collective sneaked onto the Bedminster property at night and built a mock graveyard with headstones announcing the death of “decency” and “our future.”
“It made me afraid,” Morales said. “We began to wonder: What if someone comes and puts a bomb in here?”
Morales had witnessed her father being killed in Guatemala when she was a child and had crossed the U.S. border illegally in 1999. She had a job packing disposable diapers at a warehouse in New Jersey before being hired at Trump’s club.
Morales had not considered speaking against Trump, given her precarious status in the U.S. and her powerful boss.
But working conditions had deteriorated, and the way Trump talked about Central Americans made her feel angry and frightened. What would stop him from rounding her and her family up and sending them back to Guatemala?
“This is bad. This is not normal,” Morales recalled thinking. “He is acting this way knowing that we are working for him inside.”
Diaz left her job at Bedminster and became a permanent U.S. resident after her daughter, a U.S. citizen, petitioned on her behalf. Her husband and son, however, remained undocumented, and Diaz wanted help getting them legal residency.
She had seen Anibal Romero, an immigration lawyer, discuss such topics on Facebook. In August, she drove to Newark, N.J., and walked into Romero’s firm on Ferry Street, between a dental office and a liquor store.
Inside, a television showed a news report on Trump’s calls to end birthright citizenship.
“How incredible is this guy?” Diaz told Romero. “Can you believe I worked for him?”
The conversation turned to Diaz’s years under Trump and her dozens of undocumented colleagues. She told him she’d been mistreated and lost out on promotions because she didn’t have a valid work permit.
Romero normally handled lower-profile cases involving migrants fighting deportation or seeking asylum.
“This isn’t the type of client that walks in on a daily basis,” he recalled. “I knew this would be a big thing.”
Romero suspected that the Trump Organization routinely employed undocumented workers in violation of U.S. federal law.
He wanted Diaz, Morales and other undocumented Trump employees who became his clients to be treated as material witnesses in a possible federal crime — a designation that could protect them
from being deported.
One of the meetings he arranged was with Thomas Eicher, an assistant New Jersey attorney general and head of the public integrity office. In early November 2018, Morales and Diaz sat with Eicher, describing their stories and handing over pay stubs and other evidence of their employment.
As the meeting ended, Morales moved to put her fake Social Security
and green cards back in her purse. Eicher said the documentation was staying, the women said.
When they got into the hallway, Morales was nearly in tears. “Sandra, what do I do?” she said. She would not get her protected status. And she now had to buy more fake papers to keep working — ones that wouldn’t match the ones in the Trump Organization’s files.
The New Jersey attorney general’s office declined to comment.
Many of Diaz and Morales’s friends and colleagues, a tightknit
community of immigrants in Bound Brook, N.J., accused her of risking others’ jobs and setting them up to be deported.
“I also worked there a long time without papers but the most incredible thing is to see how people, when they have papers, forget how they got here,” Antonio Zuniga, a former Bedminster greenskeeper, wrote on Facebook.
“I’m sorry, but people like you Dona Sandra have forgotten their principles.”
Zuniga did not respond to requests for comment
The friends’ fears about repercussions were soon realized.
In January, Trump’s son, Eric, announced that as a result of news reports about the Trump Organization’s undocumented workers, the company was “making a broad effort to identify any employee who has given false and fraudulent documents to unlawfully gain employment,” and that any such people would be fired immediately.
The company began auditing the legal status of its employees at its golf courses. A top human resources executive at the company visited golf courses and called workers one by one into meetings, where they learned they were summarily fired.
A precise count of firings is unknown. The Post has confirmed at least 18 firings at five golf courses in New York and New Jersey. At Bedminster, former workers estimate that 30 to 40 more undocumented employees were not asked back this spring.
“Our employees are like family, but when presented with fake documents, an employer has little choice,” Eric Trump told The Post earlier this year.
Two months after Diaz and Morales first told their stories, Democrats in Congress invited the pair to be guests at Trump’s State of the Union address.
(“Tolerance for illegal immigration is not compassionate — it is cruel,” Trump said in his speech that day in February.)
When Trump announced his campaign for a second term in June at a rally in Orlando, Fla., Diaz and Morales were there to protest and to remind people of their existence.
“We are here to show our faces not just for ourselves but for the 11 million (undocumented) immigrants who are here in the country,” Morales said at a news conference that day.
Despite repeated calls by Democrats in Congress, it is unclear whether the Department of Homeland Security or other agencies are investigating the Trump Organization’s use of undocumented labour.
The New York State attorney general’s office opened an inquiry and interviewed more than 20 former workers about potential wage violations at the company, but former workers say they have heard nothing in months. An official in the attorney general’s office said last month that the inquiry is ongoing but declined to offer further details.
This is bad. This is not normal. He (Donald Trump) is acting this way knowing that we are working for him.
When Diaz finally spoke out, she felt relief, and a new sense of purpose, to be able to share her experience, but also to stand up for those immigrants whom Trump often disparages.
She became an advocate for other undocumented Trump employees, somebody who could relate to their lives and concerns. Working for Romero’s law firm, she travelled to cities up and down the eastern seaboard to meet dozens of her former colleagues at other Trump properties.
At one point this year, she stood in a kitchen in Charlottesville, Va., talking to an undocumented immigrant who still was employed at Trump Winery. The worker had spread out years of Trump Organization pay stubs, tax documents and health records on a table.
To an outsider, it may have seemed counterintuitive to stockpile all this proof of illegal labour.
“Do you know why we save everything, we Hispanics?” Diaz said to a reporter who was watching.
It was the hope that one day there would be amnesty for those who had lived and worked in the U.S., regardless of how they had crossed the border.
“We were always told there will be a reform, and we’ll need all our documents as proof,” she said.
“Exactly,” the winery worker said.
He was not ready to step forward with his own story. But the example of Diaz and others in Trump’s undocumented labour force had taught him to prepare for a different future. One in which he might be visible to all.