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‘My whole town practically lived there’: From Costa Rica to New Jersey, a pipeline of illegal workers for Trump goes back years
Dario Angulo with his cattle in Santa Teresa de Cajon.
Far more than a few housekeepers. A town in Costa Rica helped fill the illegal worker pipeline that staffed the Trump Golf Course in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Dario Angulo with his cattle in Santa Teresa de Cajon.
2/8/19
SANTA TERESA DE CAJON, COSTA RICA — At his home on the misty slope of Costa Rica’s tallest mountain, Dario Angulo keeps a set of photographs from the years he tended the rolling fairways and clipped greens of a faraway American golf resort. Angulo learned to drive backhoes and bulldozers, carving water hazards and tee boxes out of former horse pastures in Bedminster, N.J., where a famous New Yorker was building a world-class course. Angulo earned $8 an hour, a fraction of what a state-licensed heavy equipment operator would make, with no benefits or overtime pay. But he stayed seven years on the grounds crew, saving enough for a small piece of land and some cattle back home. Now the 34-year-old lives with his wife and daughters in a sturdy house built by “Trump money,” as he put it, with a porch to watch the sun go down. It’s a common story in this small town. Other former employees of President Trump’s company live nearby: men who once raked the sand traps and pushed mowers through thick heat on Trump’s prized golf property — the “Summer White House,” as aides have called it — where his daughter Ivanka got married and where he wants to build a family cemetery. “Many of us helped him get what he has today,” Angulo said. “This golf course was built by illegals.”
The Washington Post spoke with 16 men and women from Costa Rica and other Latin American countries, including six in Santa Teresa de Cajon, who said they were employed at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster. All of them said they worked for Trump without legal status — and that their managers knew. The former employees who still live in New Jersey provided pay slips documenting their work at the Bedminster club. Their descriptions of Bedminster’s long reliance on illegal workers are bolstered by a newly obtained police report showing that the club’s head of security was told in 2011 about an employee suspected of using false identification papers — the first known documentation of a warning to the Trump Organization about the legal status of a worker. The company’s recent purge of unauthorized workers from at least five Trump properties contributes to mounting evidence that the president benefited for years from the work of illegal laborers he now vilifies. Over the years, Trump family members have emphasized their deep involvement in properties that carry their name. “People think of Trump as being just a face, just a brand,” Eric Trump said in a 2011 promotional video about the company’s golf courses. “We design every single tee, every fairway. . . . We pick the carpets. We pick the chandeliers. There is not one element of these clubhouses which we don’t know about it. You name it — we’re involved.”
Far more than a few housekeepers. A town in Costa Rica helped fill the illegal worker pipeline that staffed the Trump Golf Course in Bedminster, New Jersey.