Undocumented Trump Golf Course Housekeeper Says She Does Not Regret Going Public

Despite risking her job and possible deportation, the undocumented immigrant who publicly identified herself as an employee of President Donald Trump’s New Jersey golf club says she does not regret speaking out.

“We need to come out and defend ourselves,” Victorina Morales told The Associated Press through tears, referring to other undocumented workers at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster. “I had enough with suffering.”

According to Morales, whose story was first reported by The New York Times last week, “many people without papers” work at the golf club. She said she and other undocumented workers are subjected to abusive comments and discrimination from supervisors because of their immigration status. She told AP that, according to the news service’s story, one supervisor “pushed her against a wall three times, told her to stop speaking Spanish and threatened her with deportation if she complained.”

Some supervisors have allegedly referred to undocumented employees as “donkeys” and “dogs,” she said.

Morales, who has worked as a housekeeper at the golf club for more than five years and has personally cleaned Trump’s on-site residence on many occasions, said she believes the president’s inflammatory rhetoric about undocumented immigrants has encouraged such verbal harassing.

“We are tired of the abuse, the insults, the way he talks about us when he knows that we are here helping him make money,” Morales told the Times. “We sweat it out to attend to his every need and have to put up with his humiliation.”

At least three other immigrant women who worked at Trump’s Bedminster club have come forward in recent days to say that they also were undocumented at the time of their employment ― and that club management knew about their immigration status.

“The president says that in the places he owns he does not hire any undocumented workers … It is a lie,” Sarah Diaz, a native of Costa Rica who worked at the club from 2010 to 2013 and is now a legal U.S. resident, told AP.

It appears unlikely that Trump himself would be aware of the four women’s immigration status.

A spokeswoman for the golf club said in a statement last week that any employee found to have submitted false documentation would be immediately fired. 

Morales, who said she used fake Social Security and permanent residency documents to get the job, told AP she had not been told “definitively” that she has been fired. She and Diaz are reportedly considering filing suit against the Trump Organization for workplace abuse and discrimination.

Morales, a Guatemala native whose family has received death threats, said she is seeking asylum in order to stay in the U.S.