At least seven undocumented immigrants say they worked for the Trump Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia – the one President Donald Trump plugged, falsely claiming during his infamous 2017 “both sides” defense of neo-Nazis was “one of the largest wineries in the United States.”
“I’ve been here for six or five years,” one of the workers, who claims he was hired after presenting false documents that were not verified, told Univision News. “They’ve never asked me for anything, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
President Trump made illegal immigration the centerpiece of his campaign in 2015, and has worked tirelessly to attack undocumented immigrants and asylum-seeking migrants while in office. And while insisting some of the neo-Nazis were “very fine people,” he called Mexicans coming into America “rapists.” And more recently, he’s resorted to calling undocumented immigrants “animals.”
Univision, in an exclusive published Friday, reports the undocumented workers put “in long hours from sunrise to sunset, without overtime pay.”
Another employee at the Trump Winery told Univision that “they know you are undocumented, because if you look (closely) at the Social Security papers that are handed to them, they’re false.”
The Winery is not he only Trump property that has hired undocumented workers, as The Washington Post’s David Farenthold notes:
At the Trump Winery’s luxury hotel workers say they are paid low wages – one said she makes just $10 an hour. Some get benefits, some get none.
“There was no overtime, at least when I worked, no benefits either,” said one worker who left, adding, “if you got sick they didn’t pay you.”
But as a “consolation prize,” some workers are given vouchers that say, “We appreciate you..”
It’s good for a free lunch, and features the President’s photo – not President Donald Trump, but Trump Winery president Eric Trump.
President Trump said he owns the winery but he may or may not. The Trump Winery website says Eric Trump, the president’s son, owns it, while investigations suggest otherwise. Donald Trump purchased it in 2011.
But either way, contrary to what President Trump claimed in 2017, it’s not “one of the largest wineries in the United States.”
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