Melania Trump faces immigration questions
WASHINGTON — After a campaign full of fierce vows to stop foreigners from entering the U.S. illegally, Donald Trump is now facing an immigration controversy close to home.
Trump’s wife, Melania, who was born in what is now Slovenia and worked as a New York fashion model in the mid-1990s, has held herself up as an example of an immigrant who came to the U.S. legally and followed the law. She said she applied for a green card and eventually obtained U.S. citizenship.
But the timing of her early photo shoots and her own accounts of her travels have created questions about when she first entered the U.S. and whether she was legally permitted to work during her earliest days here.
Her original modeling agent in the U.S., Paolo Zampolli, said Thursday that he recruited her to come to New York from Milan and helped her obtain an H1-B visa, which allowed her to stay in the U.S. for three years and do modeling work.
“She never worked illegally for our agency. She always worked with a visa,” Zampolli said in a phone interview. “It’s very easy, very standard, to get a model visa, because she had experience in Europe. Trust me, I don’t want to be lying about this. She had a visa.”
The questions about Melania Trump’s immigration history are particularly sensitive for Donald Trump, who has made attacks on immigrants a touchstone of his presidential campaign. Trump has characterized Mexican immigrants as rapists, vowed to keep out Muslims and promised to build a wall along the U.S.Mexican border.
The Trump campaign has not provided details of Melania’s visa history or released her records. On Thursday, following a report on Politico, she released a statement saying she had always followed the rules. She said she obtained a green card in 2001 and became a U.S. citizen in 2006.
“Let me set the record straight: I have at all times been in full compliance with the immigration laws of this country,” she said on Twitter, after questions about her history were raised in news reports.
“Any allegation to the contrary is simply untrue.”