A Guatemalan woman is coming clean about a secret she says kept her in a void for five years.
Victorina Morales said in a recent interview with that she was employed by the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey as a housekeeper. Morales says she did so as an undocumented worker and gained employment using false documents.
Morales, 45, says she wasn’t the only person working there illegally and that a manager was aware of their status.
, comes amid a debate over immigration and border security.
President Donald Trump has said he wants $5 billion to build a wall along the southern U.S. border and that a partial government shutdown will continue until he gets the money from Congress.
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Amid the manicured green hills and the opulent Georgian manor of the New Jersey golf club, Morales tended to the housekeeping needs of members of the first family, including President Trump, his daughter Ivanka and first lady Melania Trump.
Her first day on the job was April 15, 2013, the day after her interview. From fellow housekeeper and confidante Sandra Diaz, a Costa Rican who at the time of her employment was undocumented, Morales picked up the ground rules: no perfume or makeup, special shoes to enter. Among the president’s pet peeves: dust and flies.
“I’ll come back when they’re gone,” Diaz recalled Trump saying once, disgusted by the flies in his clubhouse patio. Flies are common during New Jersey’s humid summer months.
“He gets red hot, angry,” Diaz added.
On the property grounds, Melania was strict, but courteous. Ivanka rarely said hello. But Donald Trump was, for the most part, thoughtful toward workers who met his expectations, the two women attest. He kept $100, $50 and $20 bills in his nightstand, according to Diaz, lining his pockets daily to tip those worthy of his praise, which included Morales and Diaz.
The problem was not the president, Morales thought, at least not initially.
“I just met a good blond man,” she told Diaz. “I would tell people, this man is so good. He gives us tips. He never looks down upon us.”
In 1999, Morales endured dehydration and hunger in the Texas desert, at one point covered in ants while lying flat to hide from “la migra,” U.S. Border Patrol officers. Fourteen years later, on Trump’s property for the first time, Morales looked to heaven.
“Beautiful God,” she said, “You have opened these doors for me.”
What Morales didn’t realize at the time was the length one supervisor would go to make her and other undocumented workers feel inferior.
The supervisor initially reassured her, “We take good papers and bad papers,” a contradiction of Trump’s insistence, three years later on the campaign trail, that his company “didn’t have one illegal immigrant on the job.”
The then-presidential candidate’s on-air comments baffled his employees. As foreign-born workers, they took offense to Trump’s 2015 attack on undocumented Mexican immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
“Is it that he’s crazy? Why this attitude toward us?” Morales said she wondered privately at her home in nearby Bound Brook, New Jersey.
“We began to speak amongst ourselves,” said Diaz, who had left the Trump property for another job. “But everyone stayed quiet, because everyone had their own interests.”
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According to Morales, it was then that her supervisor, emboldened by the president, became more aggressive. It was those actions that have led Morales and Diaz to consider a civil lawsuit against the Trump Organization, alleging workplace abuse and discrimination.
“She told us we were donkeys … that her dog understood more English than us,” Morales told VOA.
On multiple occasions, Morales alleges the supervisor shoved her while inside the laundry room, once nearly causing Morales to hit her forehead on the corner of a washing machine.
“Vicky called me, crying,” said Diaz, after one such incident. “[Her supervisor] told her that if she tried to leave the institution or complained about it … migration [immigration authorities] could show up at her door.”
VOA reached out to both the Trump Organization and the White House for comment, but multiple requests went unanswered.