A House Democrat invited an illegal immigrant who was fired from the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., to President Trump’s State of the Union address next week.
Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N.J., announced Thursday that she extended the offer to Victorina Morales, who lives in her district in Bound Brook and since being fired has become an advocate for fellow illegal immigrants.
In a statement, Coleman blamed Trump for the recent partial government shutdown stemming from his demand for border security funding, which led to a delay of the State of the Union address to Feb. 5.
“President Trump justified shutting the government down for 5 weeks by demonizing immigrants as the scourge of the country and the root of our nation’s crime and insecurity,” she said. “Meanwhile, CEO Trump led a company that has relied extensively on the hard work of undocumented immigrants like my constituent Victorina to keep his resorts clean and his putting greens trimmed. Donald Trump wants to build silly walls to stop the same immigrants that he’s made a career and a fortune from exploiting.”
Morales, who identified herself as a housekeeper who worked at the golf resort for five years, came forward in the last month as one of a number of undocumented immigrants fired at Trump golf properties. The use of illegal immigrant labor contrasts with the president’s hard-line stance on immigration.
“They knew that I didn’t have documents, and the supervisor, Jorge, took my ID photo in the laundry room, and a cousin of his took me to a place to get fake documents,” Morales said in a recent NPR interview. “He told me that I had to pay for them, and I said, sorry, but I don’t have money to pay for that. He told me not to worry about it, that he would cover it and I could pay it back.”
Congress has less than three weeks until a short-term spending bill expires. A bipartisan group of 17 House and Senate lawmakers met for the first time Wednesday in an effort to strike a deal on border security and federal funding by a Feb. 15 deadline.
Trump has demanded $5.7 billion for border wall funding, but opposing Democrats in Congress have refused to budge. Trump and his team have also threatened the declaration of a national emergency to redirect funds to such a project, which would almost certainly lead to a legal fight.
Coleman called for a “bipartisan immigration reform plan — one that both secures our border and establishes a pathway to citizenship for people like Victorina, who are positively contributing to our communities.”
She also called on Trump, who has pushed for his U.S.-Mexico borer wall by claiming illegal immigration allows a large conduit for criminals to enter the U.S., to “acknowledge” that most immigrants are good people.
“I hope that in his State of the Union address, Donald Trump will finally acknowledge the real face of immigrants in this country — women and children fleeing violence, law-abiding, tax-paying people who would do almost anything to be Americans,” Coleman said. “And if he can’t, I’ve invited Victorina so that he may look her in her eyes to tell his lies to a familiar face.”
