The president’s sons entrusted their private hunting retreat to a caretaker. He was working in the country illegally.
By Joshua Partlow ,
Nick Miroff and
David A. Fahrenthold March 6 at 12:05 PM
WINGDALE, N.Y. — One morning last May, Eric Trump sent a text message to the caretaker of the shooting range he and his brother own in Upstate New York. The weather was getting warmer, and it was time to plant crops to attract deer that the Trumps and their friends could hunt.
“Juan — how are the fields coming along,” Eric Trump wrote to Juan Quintero. “They need to be planted in the next week or so in order to make the season. Hope you are great.”
“I’m working in it,” Quintero replied in his limited English.
Quintero, 42, was so trusted by the Trumps that he had not one but two jobs working for the family. He was a greenskeeper at the Trump National Golf Club Hudson Valley in Hopewell Junction, N.Y., where he would work eight-hour shifts on weekdays. Then he would put in five more hours each day as a contractor at the 171-acre hunting retreat called Leather Hill Preserve, which serves as a private weekend playground for President Trump’s sons and the property’s co-owners.
He also was an immigrant from Mexico who had crossed the border more than two decades ago and was working illegally in the United States.
In January, Quintero lost his golf course job after 18 years of employment — part of a purge of undocumented workers from Trump’s businesses amid revelations that the company relied on illegal labor for years, well into Trump’s presidency. Gone, too, was his side job at the hunting retreat.
“All of the years you give them, and they just let you go,” Quintero said in a recent interview at his home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. “They do not say, ‘Let’s do something, let’s try to help you.’ They simply said, ‘Your documents are not valid,’ and that is it.”
Quintero said he never directly told Eric Trump about his immigration status. But he said he remained employed by the hunting lodge for more than a year after not providing the owners with a Social Security number when they sought to issue him a debit card.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-presidents-sons-entrusted-their-private-hunting-retreat-to-a-caretaker-he-was-working-in-the-country-illegally/2019/03/06/d86b4e80-35f9-11e9-a400-e481bf264fdc_story.html?utm_term=.e936e54e364d
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