Trump responds to illegal-worker question

After months of silence, President Donald Trump responded Friday to reports that the Trump Organization has employed dozens of undocumented immigrants by saying that he doesn’t know whether the organization does.

“I don’t know because I don’t run it,” Trump said when asked whether he is confident that undocumented immigrants are no longer working at his golf courses. “But I would say this: Probably every club in the United States has that because it seems to be, from what I understand, a way that people did business.”

The New York Times first reported in December that Victorina Morales, a Guatemalan undocumented immigrant, and several others living in the country unlawfully had been employed at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where Trump was heading Friday.

Many undocumented workers at other Trump properties, including resorts in Philadelphia, Westchester County, New York, and Jupiter, Florida, have come forward since then and said they also were employed using phony Social Security numbers and green cards.

After the revelations, the Trump Organization said that all its properties had begun to use E-verify, an electronic verification system that checks documents provided by new employees against Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security records to identify fakes. The same month, dozens of undocumented workers were fired at Bedminster and two other clubs in New York and New Jersey.

As Trump was about to step onto Marine One to head to the Bedminster club Friday, he seemed to indicate that the Trump Organization has strengthened its hiring processes to ensure that it is no longer employing undocumented immigrants.

“But we’ve ended — whatever they did, we have a very strict rule that, those rules are very strict,” Trump said.

The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment.