Trump once advocated a ‘huge financial penalty’ for those employing undocumented immigrants

During the recent government shutdown, a number of people who worked for Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, N.Y., were summoned to the facility — then closed for the season — for a meeting with their bosses. There, they were fired, some after years of service, because they were in the country illegally. The terminations followed a similar action at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., last year.

On Friday, The Washington Post reported that there are entire communities of former Trump Organization employees in Central America, people who once worked illegally for President Trump’s sprawling resort empire as undocumented immigrants, often with their supervisors’ knowledge. People who helped build the Trump Organization as it now is, some of whom were lucky to avoid the fate of those staffers in Westchester, moving back home before the politics of a president railing against illegal immigration while profiting from undocumented immigrants’ work became untenable.

This issue came up during the campaign, too, on several occasions. As with so many other controversies that Trump faced during 2016, the question of his employing undocumented immigrants — as when The Post talked to people building his hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington — was quickly washed away by some other newer or bigger controversy. But when it came up, it prompted Trump to assert repeatedly that he was doing something he clearly wasn’t: Screening his employees to make sure they could work legally in the United States.

At one point, in fact, he suggested that those who employ immigrants in the country illegally should face “a huge financial penalty” — or that it “could be beyond a financial penalty.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/08/trump-once-advocated-huge-financial-penalty-those-employing-undocumented-immigrants/?utm_term=.67078108cc43