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Washington, DC — Following last Thursday’s historic verdict announcement, Donald Trump immediately pivoted to his favorite anti-immigrant talking points as part of his post-conviction rant in the hall of the courthouse to air his grievances – and lie – noting:
“…our country’s gone to hell. We don’t have the same country anymore … Millions and millions of people pouring into our country right now from prisons and from mental institutions, terrorists. And they’re taking over our country.”
Yet the connections between the Trump conviction and immigration go well beyond Trump’s rhetoric. In fact, a similar pattern of falsifying business records and payments to cover up illegal activity that led to yesterday’s conviction also describes Trump and the Trump Organization’s treatment of undocumented employees, as America’s Voice warned years ago.
According to immigration attorney David Leopold, today, “Last week’s verdict in Donald Trump’s New York trial also serves as a reminder that many of the same practices that led to his conviction were also relied on by Trump and the Trump Organization in service of importing and exploiting immigrant workers for Trump clubs, hotels, and properties. It was a multi-state criminal conspiracy made all the more galling by the reality that Donald Trump exploits and attacks immigrants for his political benefit at the same time he exploits and relies on immigrants for his own personal economic benefit. Donald Trump’s criminality, coupled with his rabid contempt for the rule of law, threatens all Americans.”
Leopold was a consulting immigration lawyer for the Trump workers and serves as legal advisor to America’s Voice, Chair of Immigration at UB Greensfelder LLP, and former President of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
In 2018 and 2019, through the stories of multiple undocumented workers from Trump Organization golf clubs in New York and New Jersey, America’s Voice helped spotlight that the Trump Organization engaged in a multi-state criminal conspiracy that stretched back decades. These undocumented employees said supervisors helped undocumented workers procure false documents to conceal their status and that undocumented workers were compensated differently — and worse — than other employees. The potential criminal charges against the Trump Organization included trafficking, conspiracy, false document procurement, and forced or coerced labor. The Trump Organization could also be exposed to additional tax, labor, and civil liabilities if the allegations were investigated and found to be true.
In the Washington Post in December 2019, Joshua Partlow and David Fahrenthold wrote “Trump Organization fires more undocumented workers — a year after its use of illegal labor was revealed,” which included a quote from Omar Miranda, a tractor driver from Honduras fired from the Trump Winery after the annual grape harvest was completed – again, underlying the exploitative treatment of workers. Miranda said: “They didn’t make this decision in the summer because they needed us a lot then.” A second unnamed employee also told the Post, “I think they wanted to get their product out well, the grapes, to make sure that was taken care of, and once things were slow, they could fire us all.”
As Leopold stated at the time, “The Trump Presidency is founded on his outrage over immigrant workers, yet his company is knowingly exploiting and trafficking in immigrant workers for profit. The pattern of behavior is criminal and the hypocrisy from Trump is unfathomable.”