A 'pipeline' of undocumented immigrants reportedly helped build and maintain Trump's New Jersey golf club

The undocumented immigrant employees recently fired from President Trump's Bedminster, New Jersey golf club were not merely individual workers who "slipped through the cracks," but rather part of a "long-running pipeline" that ran from Central America to New Jersey — "a wellspring of low-paid labor," The Washington Post reported Friday.

One former Costa Rican maintenance worker told the Post that his "whole town practically lived there" working to build and maintain the golf club. The Post spoke with 16 former club employees from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, and Guatemala; all said that they had worked illegally at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, needing only a "crudely printed" fake green card and a fraudulent Social Security number obtained in the U.S., and that their managers knew of their status.

Though a centerpiece of Trump's presidential campaign was a crackdown on illegal immigration, his clubs have been notably slow to adopt the federal E-Verify system to check the status of potential hires, the Post reports. In 2016, Trump claimed that the system was in place companywide, but only three of his 12 U.S. golf courses are currently enrolled — Bedminster is not one of them. "It was far more systematic than two or three housekeepers," said Joyce Phipps, executive director of Casa de Esperanza, a legal aid organization that worked with several Bedminster employees. "It's been a very open secret."

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The workers said that they earned around $10 an hour or less — or about $40 an hour less than a licensed New Jersey worker doing similar work — to, in the words of one laborer, "rake, rake, rake, the whole day." The work was backbreaking, and often lasted all day, seven days a week. And when Trump visited, the workers were kept from sight. "We had to be invisible," one former groundskeeper said.

The Trump Organization declined comment, as did the White House and Bedminster's current managers. Read more at The Washington Post.