Politics - News Analysis

Over 100 Undocumented Workers Helped Build Trump’s NJ Bedminster Resort: ‘Illegals Built This Golf Course’

According to the Washington Post, undocumented immigrants who say they’ve worked illegally at Donald Trump’s properties for years are coming forward en masse and saying the renowned golf courses relied on their low-paid labor to succeed.

“Many of us helped him get what he has today,” Dario Angulo, a former grounds crew member at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, told The Post. “This golf course was built by illegals.”

The Post spoke to 16 former Bedminster employees who said they worked for Trump illegally, and alleged that their managers were aware of their immigration statuses.

Angulo and several other Costa Rican immigrants, including Juan Carlos Zuñiga and Abel Mora, told The Post that they helped build the Bedminster golf club from the ground up in 2002. They recalled working from dawn until dusk every day of the week, performing intensely physical work — all for wages of $10 per hour or less.

“It was rake, rake, rake, the whole day,” Zuñiga told the newspaper, adding that bosses told him and his friends to bring more workers.

The immigrants told The Post they purchased fake green cards and Social Security numbers to get their jobs, and that they were so clearly fake that they prompted jokes among the bosses.

According to a 2011 police report obtained by The Post, a top Bedminster manager was aware that at least one employee was suspected of being in the country illegally, though it’s unclear whether the employee was deported or whether the manager shared the document with others.

One former housekeeper at the resort told the Post that it was known by undocumented staff that managers at the resort didn’t care about workers’ legal status.

“My friend said there was nothing to worry about. She told me, ‘They don’t care,’ ” said the housekeeper.

One woman who worked at the club told the newspaper that undocumented workers would be hidden by managers when Trump himself arrived to dine or otherwise enjoy the resort.

“They would tell us it was because the restaurant was hosting an important event, and only the workers who could speak English could be there,” she told the Post.

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