Sandra Díaz and Victorina Morales worked for Donald Trump long before the title ‘president’ preceded his name. Now, years after working with their previous boss, they are calling him out on his harsh policies and remarks about immigrants.
Morales and Díaz worked for the golf club that the tycoon’s business group owns in Bedminster, New Jersey, where they served the now-president hand and foot. Díaz, a 46-year-old Costa Rican, worked for the golf club between 2010 and 2013 without documents, although she has since received her legal permanent residency. Morales, 45, was initially hired as Díaz’s replacement.
Both women worked for Trump without immigration papers, and even though for most of their lives they tried to go unnoticed in order to not be deported, they are now speaking out against what they call a big hypocrisy. They claim that a large number of their co-workers were undocumented, and that management was often aware. Still, they couldn’t reconcile the fact that the same man who ordered them around in his own club had such harsh views on immigration.
“When I saw him on television, how he expressed himself about us (immigrants), I thought: ‘This man is crazy’,” Morales, a 45-year-old Guatemalan, told Telemundo. “If he sees us there [working at his golf club], why does he treat us like that?”
This, coupled with the humiliations and insults of their supervisor, who had a legal status, was what motivated them to speak up for all immigrants who might be suffering the same abuse.
“If I left it is because of the things that we go through in this country and what we have endured. I apologize if they believe I am in the wrong. But I am speaking for all of those who are here. We do not come to invade the country, we come to work,” said Morales.
For his part, Trump, who still owns the Trump Organization but has left day-to-day control to his elder sons, has said he does not know whether it employs undocumented workers.
“Well, that I don’t know. Because I don’t run it,” he told reporters in July, according to The Washington Post. “But I would say this: Probably every club in the United States has that, because it seems to me, from what I understand, a way that people did business.”
However, Díaz maintains that this situation was known by numerous supervisors and that she suspects Trump himself was aware. “He had to know,” Díaz told Telemundo, “because it is obvious we are not Americans.”
The women also revealed intimate things about Trump including that he used to stain his shirts from wearing makeup and that he allegedly didn’t like “neither black nor fat nor ugly people,” according to Díaz.
Díaz and Morales have told their story in various news outlets, from Telemundo and Univision to The New York Times and The Washington Post.
“We are many, the people who have worked for him, many of us undocumented, too,” Diaz told Telemundo in a direct message to the president. “Give us an opportunity for immigration reform. I would beg [Trump] to see how we work. We are not scared. That’s why I left the hole, because I was drowning.”
