Trump's premiere New Jersey golf course has employed enough undocumented immigrants to fill an entire Costa Rica town: report

On Friday, David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post released a damning exposé of the full scope of how the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey went out of its way to employ undocumented immigrants for years, to the point where the town of Santa Teresa de Cajon, Costa Rica is full of homes paid for by income from the Trump property:

Soon after Trump broke ground at Bedminster in 2002 with a golden shovel, this village emerged as a wellspring of low-paid labor for the private club, which charges tens of thousands of dollars to join. Over the years, dozens of workers from Costa Rica went north to fill jobs as groundskeepers, housekeepers and dishwashers at Bedminster, former employees said. The club hired others from El Salvador, Mexico and Guatemala who spoke to The Post. Many ended up in the blue-collar borough of Bound Brook, N.J., piling into vans before dawn to head to the course each morning.

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 Bedminster golf club effectively became a pipeline for Central Americans to come to the U.S. and work illegally, reports the Post, as "workers recruited friends and relatives, some flying to the United States on tourist visas and others paying smugglers thousands of dollars to help them cross the U.S.-Mexico border," and new hires were taken on with just "a crudely printed phony green card and a fake Social Security number to land a job."

In December, after The New York Timesrevealed that two undocumented housekeepers worked at the property, the Trump Organization commenced a mass purge, firing 18 employees at five different Trump golf properties in the tri-state area.

This is a particularly poor look for President Donald Trump, who not only has made cutting immigration — even legal immigration — a top priority, and shut down the government to try to force Congress to fund a border wall, but who also claimed falsely on the campaign trail in 2016 that he was using the government's E-Verify system at all of his properties.

The problem is, when push comes to shove, many businesses like using undocumented labor because it is cheaper, there are no labor rights to speak of, and managers can keep employees in line by threatening to turn them over to ICE. And the Trump Organization — the empire of the man who led a nativist call to arms against immigration in all forms — is an egregious offender.