About a dozen employees from Latin America who had been on the staff of Trump’s New York golf club for years were purged this month.
OSSINING, N.Y — They had spent years on the staff of Donald Trump’s golf club, winning employee-of-the-month awards and receiving glowing letters of recommendation.
Some were trusted enough to hold the keys to Eric Trump’s weekend home. They were experienced enough to know that – when Donald Trump ordered chicken wings – they were to serve him two orders on one plate.
But on Jan. 18, about a dozen employees at Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, New York, were summoned, one by one, to talk with a human resources executive from Trump headquarters.
During the meetings, they were fired because they are undocumented immigrants, according to interviews with the workers and their attorney. The fired workers are from Latin America.
The sudden firings – which were previously unreported – follow last year’s revelations of undocumented labor at a Trump club in New Jersey, where employees were subsequently dismissed. The firings show Trump’s business was relying on undocumented workers even as the president demanded a border wall to keep out such immigrants.
Trump’s demand for border wall funding led to the government shutdown that ended Friday after nearly 35 days.
In Westchester County, workers were told Trump’s company had just audited their immigration documents – the same ones they had submitted years earlier – and found them to be fake.
“Unfortunately, this means the club must end its employment relationship with you today,” the Trump executive said, according to a recording that one worker made of her firing.
“I started to cry,” said Gabriel Sedano, a former maintenance worker from Mexico who was among those fired. He had worked at the club since 2005. “I told them they needed to consider us. I had worked almost 15 years for them in this club, and I’d given the best of myself to this job.”
“I’d never done anything wrong, only work and work,” he added. “They said they didn’t have any comments to make.”
The mass firings at the New York golf club – which workers said eliminated about half of the club’s wintertime staff – follow a story in The New York Times last year that featured an undocumented worker at another Trump club in Bedminster, New Jersey. After that story, Trump’s company fired undocumented workers at the Bedminster club, according to former workers there.
Trump still owns his businesses, which include 16 golf courses and 11 hotels around the world. He has given day-to-day control of the businesses to his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
In an emailed statement, Eric Trump said, “We are making a broad effort to identify any employee who has given false and fraudulent documents to unlawfully gain employment. Where identified, any individual will be terminated immediately.”
He added that it is one of the reasons “my father is fighting so hard for immigration reform. The system is broken.”
Eric Trump did not respond to specific questions about how many undocumented workers had been fired at other Trump properties and whether the company had, in the past, made similar audits of its employees’ immigration paperwork. He also did not answer whether executives had previously been aware that they employed undocumented workers.
This Trump golf club does not appear in the government’s list of participants in the E-Verify system, which allows employers to confirm their employees are in the country legally. Eric Trump did not answer a question about whether the club would join the system.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.
The firings highlight a stark tension between Trump’s public stance on immigration and the private conduct of Trump’s business.
In public, Trump has argued that undocumented immigrants have harmed American workers by driving down wages. That was part of why Trump demanded a border wall and contemplated declaring a national emergency to get it.
But, in Westchester County, Trump seems to have benefited from the same dynamic he denounces.
