Trump course’s trail of workers
When laborers needed, towns in Central America answered call
SANTA TERESA DE CAJON, Costa Rica — At his home on the misty slope of Costa Rica’s tallest mountain, Dario Angulo keeps a set of photographs from the years he tended the rolling fairways and clipped greens of a faraway American golf resort.
Angulo learned to drive backhoes and bulldozers, carving water hazards and tee boxes out of former horse pastures in Bedminster, N.J., where a famous New Yorker was building a world-class course. Angulo earned $8 an hour, a fraction of what a statelicensed heavy equipment operator would make, with no benefits or overtime pay. But he stayed seven years on the grounds crew, saving enough for a small piece of land and some cattle back home.
Now the 34-year-old lives with his wife and daughters in a sturdy house built by “Trump money,” as he put it, with a porch to watch the sun go down.
It’s a common story in this small town.
Other former employees of President Donald Trump’s company live nearby: men who once raked the sand traps and pushed mowers through thick heat on Trump’s prized golf property — the “Summer White House,” as aides have called it.
“Many of us helped him get what he has today,” Angulo said. “This golf course was built by illegals.”
The Washington Post spoke with 16 men and women from Costa Rica and other Latin American countries, including six in Santa Teresa de Cajon, who said
they were employed at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster. All of them said they worked for Trump without legal status — and that their managers knew.
The former employees who still live in New Jersey provided pay slips documenting their work at the Bedminster club. In Costa Rica, The Post located former workers in two regions who shared memorabilia they had kept, such as Trump-branded golf tees, as well as photos of themselves at the club.
Over the years after Trump broke ground at Bedminster in 2002, dozens of workers went north to fill jobs as groundskeepers, housekeepers and dishwashers at Bedminster, former employees said.
Their descriptions of Bedminster’s long reliance on illegal workers are bolstered by a newly obtained police report showing that the club’s head of security was told in 2011 about an employee suspected of using false identification papers — the first known documentation of a warning to the Trump Organization about the legal status of a worker.
Eric Trump, a son of the president who runs the Trump Organization along with his brother Donald Trump Jr., declined to comment on the accounts by the former workers. Bedminster managers did not return requests for comment.
The network from Costa Rica to Bedminster expanded as workers recruited friends and relatives. New hires needed little more than a crudely printed phony green card and a fake Social Security number to land a job, they said.
After the New York Times in December reported about two housekeepers without legal status who worked at Bedminster, the Trump Organization fired at least 18 employees at five golf courses in New York and New Jersey, part of what Eric Trump has said is “a broad effort” to identify unauthorized workers. An additional undisclosed number were fired from Bedminster, former employees said.
“This situation is not unique to Trump Organization — it is one that all companies face,” he told The Post last month. “It demonstrates that our immigration system is severely broken and needs to be fixed immediately.”
But the lax hiring practices at Bedminster and other Trump properties described by former employees — including some who said their supervisors discussed their fake documents — stand in sharp contrast with Trump’s rhetoric.
While other top-tier golf U.S. courses adopted the federal government’s E-Verify system to check the immigration status of potential hires, the Trump Organization is only now planning to implement it throughout its properties — even though then-candidate Donald Trump claimed in 2016 he was using it across his company.
Of 12 Trump golf courses in the United States, three of them — in North Carolina, Southern California, and Doral, Fla. — are enrolled in the E-Verify system, according to a federal database.
The government has offered employers electronic verification services since 1997 and introduced the EVerify system in 2007 to allow companies to screen new hires online.
Employers have an obligation to verify an employee’s eligibility to work in the United States and can face a range of civil and criminal penalties for hiring illegal workers, according to immigration attorneys. When an employee submits documents such as a permanent resident card or Social Security card for employees, employers have a responsibility to examine those documents.
If an employer pays payroll taxes for an employee whose name does not match their Social Security number, the Internal Revenue Service or the Social Security Administration may send the employer what’s called a “no-match” letter.
Such a letter does not trigger any immigration proceedings or require the employer to fire the employee. Instead, it alerts the employer to ask the employee to resolve the problem by correcting the government record, said Anastasia Tonello, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
Santa Teresa de Cajon is little more than a ribbon of road set amid coffee farms and cattle pastures on the flank of 12,500-foot Mount Chirripo.
Juan Carlos Zuñiga left Santa Teresa to make the journey to the U.S. in 2002. He bought his first fake documents in Las Vegas — adopting the name Juan Lara — and hopped on a flight to New Jersey.
Zuñiga had a cousin who worked on a horse farm in genteel Bedminster Township. A nearby property needed workers, his cousin told him.
Trump had purchased the 520-acre Lamington Farm, with its brick manor house and rolling horse pastures.
As the golf course took shape, more hands were needed. Bosses told Zuñiga and his friends to bring workers. The town of Santa Teresa answered the call.
And the laborers were coming not only from Santa Teresa de Cajon, but also from other parts of Costa Rica and around Latin America. Before long, so many were working on the course — more than 100, by workers’ estimates — that Zuñiga’s cousin began charging workers for rides to Bedminster. He had two vans in circulation morning and night. When that wasn’t enough, he bought a used school bus, Zuñiga said.
Several former workers said that managers in housekeeping and maintenance were well aware their documents were fraudulent — but hired them anyway. Housekeeper Gilberta Dominguez said her manager filled out her application in 2016 because she didn’t speak English.
“And I said, ‘Listen, we don’t have good papers,’ ” Dominguez, of Oaxaca, Mexico, recalled telling her manager. “She said, ‘It doesn’t matter; don’t talk about that.’ ”
In 2005, Zuñiga said, he purchased new fake documents and turned those in to his supervisors. Juan Lara was suddenly Juan Carlos Zuñiga. His bosses didn’t flinch, he said.
“They would joke that my name was Juan Lara at the beginning,” he said.
In 2011, Hank Protinsky, then the club’s head of security, was warned by local police that an employee could be using fake papers, according to a police report obtained by The Post through a public records request.
The worker’s status was discovered when the Bedminster Township Police Department investigated a hit-and-run accident on the course and questioned a man identified as the driver: a club employee working under the name Reinaldo Villareal.
When Officer Thomas Polito spoke to Villareal, he “told me that his real name was Fredis Otero and that he was working under a false name and social security numbers,” Polito wrote.
Polito wrote in the police report that he told Protinsky his employee “may be using a false name and government documentation.”
The head of security gave the police officer a copy of Villareal’s employment application, which showed that while his resident card listed his first name as “Reynaldo,” his application spelled it “Reinaldo,” the report said.
The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment. Protinsky — who has since left the course — could not be reached for comment.
Other former workers said their jobs at Bedminster, along with Trump’s popularity with local law enforcement agencies, afforded them a degree of protection despite their immigration status.
One former kitchen staffer from Ecuador still carries an ID card with her name and photo that says she is a “supporter” of a foundation that provides scholarships to the children of New Jersey State Police. She said she got the card at a golf tournament the charity held at Bedminster. The foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
At times, rifts between legal employees and those without papers were occasionally laid bare in front of the managers.
In mid-2015, Emma Torres, a housekeeper from Ecuador, said she complained to the club’s general manager, David Schutzenhofer, about a supervisor who blocked her from taking a lunch break and frequently berated her for not speaking English.
During the meeting, she said Schutzenhofer asked her if she was going to file a complaint with the state labor department. Torres told him that would be impossible.
“I told him no, because I didn’t have papers,” she said.
Torres stayed at the club but was reassigned to the kitchen.
The Post reached out to Schutzenhofer and two dozen current and former managers at Bedminster and asked if they were aware that the club employed people without legal status. Most either declined to comment or did not respond.
One former groundskeeping manager responded only by sending The Post an animated image of Trump saying, “I have great relationships with the Mexican people.”
Another former manager, who confirmed working closely with both Zuñiga and Garro, said, “I think everyone was in the dark. We all assumed they were legal.” That manager spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships in the golf industry.
Over the years, Trump family members have emphasized their deep involvement in properties that carry their name.
“People think of Trump as being just a face, just a brand,” Eric Trump said in a 2011 promotional video about the company’s golf courses. “We design every single tee, every fairway . ... We pick the carpets. We pick the chandeliers. There is not one element of these clubhouses which we don’t know about it. You name it — we’re involved.”
Donald Trump himself was an imperious but mostly distant figure for the illegal workers, who in the early years at Bedminster would be told to make themselves scarce when “the big boss” would arrive by helicopter.
Groundskeepers would stay inside a converted horse barn used to store tools and machinery or go into the woods to wait, they said.
“When he arrived, we had to hide,” said Alan Mora, a former greenskeeper who helped build the driving range and who now works as a security guard at a resort hotel in Santa Teresa. “We had to be invisible.”
Trump’s election did not bring any added scrutiny to his workers’ immigration status, former employees said. Torres said superiors kept her name and those of other workers without legal status off a list of people to be vetted by the Secret Service before a Trump visit to the club in 2016.
In Santa Teresa de Cajon, some former Trump workers recall their New Jersey years as a rite of passage — not unlike military service or leaving home for college.
“The golf course is the best thing that has happened in my life,” said Angulo, who now earns his living raising cattle.
He said he didn’t care much for other U.S. cities, but he loved tending to the course and dreams of going back to see the place “that taught me how to work hard.”