Several undocumented workers fired from Trump golf course: report

About a dozen employees were reportedly abruptly fired last week from Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, New York, because they were found to be in the country illegally.

The firings, which were reported Saturday by The Washington Post, follow revelations last year that undocumented immigrants were hired and subsequently fired at a Trump property in New Jersey.

{mosads}The workers in New York were told that the Trump company had recently audited their immigration documents, which were found to be fake, the Post reported. Those documents had been submitted years prior to their firing. 

“Unfortunately, this means the club must end its employment relationship with you today,” a Trump executive told the employees, according to a recording one worker gave to the Post.

“I started to cry,” Gabriel Sedano, a former maintenance worker from Mexico, told the newspaper. “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.”

Eric Trump, who along with President Trump’s other adult son Donald Trump Jr. has managed the president’s business empire since he entered office, told the Post that the Trump Organization is seeking to fire anyone who has submitted false hiring paperwork.

“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,” Eric Trump said in an email to the Post.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Hill.

The news comes as President Trump has adopted several hard-line stances on immigration and asylum, maintaining pressure on Congress to appropriate the funds necessary to build a border wall. He has also denounced illegal immigration as harmful to American workers.

“On immigration policy, ‘America First’ means protecting the jobs, wages and security of American workers, whether first or 10th generation,” Trump said in 2016. “No matter who you are, we’re going to protect your job because, let me tell you, our jobs are being stripped from our country like we’re babies.”

Anibal Romero, who is representing the workers fired from the New York and New Jersey clubs, asserted that the Trump Organization has shown “a pattern and practice of hiring undocumented immigrants, not only in New Jersey, but also in New York.”

“We are demanding a full and thorough investigation from federal authorities,” Romero told the Post.

A former manager of the New York property also argued that the Trump Organization placed a higher emphasis on hiring cheap labor rather than checking for immigration status. 

“It didn’t matter. They didn’t care [about immigration status],’” the former manager told the Post. “It was, ‘Get the cheapest labor possible.’ ”