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By Kate Snow
Two years ago, when Donald Trump was running for president, he proudly declared that he employed no undocumented immigrants in the construction of his grand Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.
That doesn’t appear to be true for some of his other properties.
When Victorina Morales went to work in 2013 as a housekeeper at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, “I told them that I don’t have papers, I don’t speak English and that I was an immigrant,” she said Thursday in an interview.
“They said, ‘No, it doesn’t matter,'” she said.
Morales, 45, left Guatemala and illegally crossed the U.S. border in 1999, according to The New York Times, which she and a second woman who used to work at the golf club, Sandra Diaz, approached to tell their story in an article published earlier Thursday.
Morales, who still works at the golf club, said she knows she could be fired or deported for having come forward, according to The Times, which said she has applied for asylum.
Diaz, 46, is from Costa Rica and worked at the golf club from 2010 to 2013, according to The Times. She is now a legal resident of the United States.
They told The Times that at least two supervisors were aware of their immigration statuses and took steps to help workers evade detection.
“There are many people without papers,” Diaz told the newspaper.
The Trump Organization LLC, the primary holding company for the president’s hundreds of businesses, referred NBC News to the White House, which didn’t directly address the Times report. It said in a statement:
“We have tens of thousands of employees across our properties and have very strict hiring practices. If any employee submitted false documentation in an attempt to circumvent the law, they will be terminated immediately.”
NBC News reported in 2016 that Trump Tower in New York, the 58-story crown jewel of Trump’s real estate empire, was built using the labor of undocumented Polish immigrants almost 40 decades ago.
Trump said during the 2016 campaign that he hadn’t known about the workers’ legal statuses, and he made illegal immigration the centerpiece of his campaign, promising to build a wall along the southern U.S. border to keep undocumented immigrants out and to carry out mass deportations of those already in the country.
At various times, he has characterized immigrants from Central and South America as “barbaric,” as rapists and even as killers of children.
Morales actually liked working for Trump, she told NBC News. But she found his rhetoric about people like her distressing.
“When I saw how he talked about us when he started his presidency, I felt humiliated,” she said.
Alex Johnson contributed.
THERESA MAY will be facing a vote of no confidence after Conservative MPs turned their backs on the Prime Minister amid her negotiated Brexit deal. So what time will results on the no confidence vote be in?
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Breaking News Emails
Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
/ Updated
By Alex Johnson
Nikki Haley, who is leaving as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the end of the year, told NBC’s “Today” that she got things done by using President Donald Trump’s “unpredictable” nature to her advantage.
“He would ratchet up the rhetoric, and then I’d go back to the ambassadors and say: ‘You know, he’s pretty upset. I can’t promise you what he’s going to do or not, but I can tell you if we do these sanctions, it will keep him from going too far,'” Haley said in an exclusive interview which aired Wednesday morning.
“I know all of it,” she said in response to a question about the president’s bombastic, sometimes false statements in public and on Twitter. “But I’m disciplined enough to know not to get into the drama.”
At the United Nations, “I was trying to get the job done,” she said. “And I got the job done by being truthful, but also by letting him be unpredictable and not showing our cards.”
On one of the more delicate diplomatic issues on her watch, Haley said the United States must be careful in confronting Saudi Arabia over the brutal killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Haley made it clear that she blamed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi government for Khashoggi’s death, even as the president has said repeatedly that the United States has reached no final conclusion about the prince’s involvement.
“It was the Saudi government, and MBS is the head of the Saudi government,” Haley said Tuesday, referring to the prince by his initials. “So they are all responsible, and they don’t get a pass, not an individual, not the government — they don’t get a pass.”
At the same time, Haley stopped short of recommending giving Saudi Arabia anything more than stern talking-to, saying the Saudis were helping the United States defeat Houthi insurgents in Yemen, Hezbollah militants in Lebanon and “Iranian proxies” around the world.
“We do have to work with them in that case,” she said of the Saudis, adding: “I think we need to have a serious hard talk with the Saudis to let them know we won’t condone this. We won’t give you a pass. And don’t do this again.
“And then I think that the administrations have to talk about where we go from here. What I can tell you that’s so important is that the Saudis have been our partner in defeating and dealing with Iran. And that has been hugely important.”
Haley said that, in general, she was aware that some people believe that she and Trump aren’t always on the same page, but she said that’s only because “our styles are very different.”
“And, you know, I’ve always found that funny,” she said. “But the truth at the end of the day is I may be harder on some things or I may be tougher in some ways, but I’ve never strayed from where the president was or never strayed from where his policy wants to go.”
As for Heather Nauert, the State Department spokeswoman whom Trump has said he will nominate to succeed Haley at the United Nations, Haley said that while “I want her to be successful,” only time will tell whether her appointment was a good one.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a member of the Foreign Relations Committee whom Haley endorsed for president in 2016, has questioned Nauert’s qualifications for the sensitive post, asking whether she “has the detailed knowledge of foreign policy to be successful at the United Nations.”
But Haley noted, “a lot of people said that about me.”
“I think that we should give her the opportunity to prove to the American public what she can do,” she said. “I think that she has been working at the State Department on multiple issues for a long time.
“You know, time will tell how this works out, but I can tell you I’m going to support and help in her transition and her ability to move forward and be successful,” Haley said.
THERESA May’s husband Philip made a rare appearance in the pubic gallery of the House of Commons today in a show of support for the embattled Prime Minister.
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