[Photo: Emily Morter via Unsplash]

You’re Fired (Undocumented Trump Worker): What Odd Timing

[NB: Byline — check it!/~Rayne]

I’ve had this squirreled away in the cupboard; I was working on it just as the government shutdown ended. But now there’s good reason to dust it off and air it out.

~ ~ ~

The issue of Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) remains critically important even though government has been reopened and Trump received a pittance toward a wall.

The Washington Post reported on January 26 that undocumented workers were fired from their long-time jobs with Trump organization businesses.

What odd timing. Take a look at the sequence of events:

06DEC2018 — NYT, CNN other outlets reported the Trump organization employed undocumented workers.

22DEC2018 — Shutdown began at midnight

10JAN2018 — Citizenship applicant Matthew Helmsley was called a year earlier than expected by U.S. immigration for a pre-naturalization interview; he was asked after the interview if he was available on Saturday, January 19.

11JAN2019 — First government employee paycheck missed.

17JAN2019 — Trump announcement scheduled for Saturday, January 19, after a swearing-in ceremony for newly naturalized immigrants; the announcement regarded the ongoing government shutdown.

18JAN2019 — Media speculated about Trump’s proposal. After exchanging emails for a week with immigration personnel, citizenship candidate Helmsley received an email in that morning advising the swearing in would be at the White House the next day.

18JAN2019 — Undocumented immigrants terminated at Trump org facilities.

19JAN2019 — Trump’s proposal including tweaks to TPS and DACA floated some time between late Friday and early Saturday. House Democrats rejected the proposal ahead of Trump’s television speech — they insisted on funding and reopening government without conditions, and no money wall.

19JAN2019 — Just before his speech, Trump swore in Helmsley and a cohort of carefully selected naturalize immigrants, handpicked for political optics, in the Oval Office.

19JAN2019 — Trump gave a televised speech after 3:00 p.m., added limited TPS extension and modified DACA to his demand for wall funding.

25JAN2019 — Trump ‘caved’.

26JAN2019 — WaPo reports on firing of undocumented employees.

29JAN2019 — Original date scheduled for State of the Union address from House chambers

See that right in the middle? Undocumented personnel were fired roughly 24 hours before Trump made his special address making a counter offer.

The White House as well as the Trump organization knew more than a month before Trump’s counter proposal that undocumented workers were employed at multiple Trump business locations.

They waited until after the holidays to terminate them so as to avoid a stink.

They waited until they could use TPS and DACA as proposal items to demand wall funding, hoping the workers’ terminations would be lost in the noise about the shutdown.

And news media missed the timing.

Now here’s the other point the media missed within the last week: if Trump’s government funding proposal including limited TPS and modified DACA were offered immediately following termination of undocumented workers at Trump organization businesses — the two events coordinated and synced as if by one entity — is there any separation at all between Trump as president and Trump as head of the Trump organization?

If there isn’t, wouldn’t that make the DOJ’s so-called “narrow interpretation of a law ” this week, allowing federal officials to attempt to influence Trump by doing business with the Trump organization, really a permission slip for outright corruption via emoluments?

Meanwhile, DACA’s repeal remains up in the air, leaving roughly 800,000 residents up in the air. And TPS for Hondurans has been terminated effected November this year, forcing 86,000 to uproot from the U.S.

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11 replies
  1. OldTulsaDude says:

    I don’t fault the media, which is inundated by scandal and corruption threads to unwind, but Congress, especially the new House leaders for showing too much deference to protocol. Stop inviting. Compel.

    It is well past time for the House to use all its power, including subpoenas and firm deadlines followed by immediate Contempt of Congress citations if deadlines are missed.

  2. P J Evans says:

    I don’t think that Tr*mp sees the government as anything but a giant-sized version of his private corporations. He doesn’t understand the Constitution (and apparently never has), he doesn’t want to understand the laws limiting what he can do as President, and the Senate, run by McConnell, is going to let him run unchecked. The House holds the purse-strings, though, so they won’t fund Tr*mp’s wet-dream projects, but they will fund the social programs that Miller and the “FreeDumb” Caucus hate.

  3. BobCon says:

    I have to assume he’ll be back to his old ways soon. if he isn’t already.

    The Washington Post reported two days ago that the feds are stonewalling the House on investigations into Trump’s hiring practices. He’s bound to be hiding something:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/amid-trumps-immigration-crackdown-the-administration-is-silent-on-whether-the-presidents-own-company-is-being-scrutinized/2019/04/10/1f86866e-5afc-11e9-b8e3-b03311fbbbfe_story.html

  4. harpie says:

    Most days I have a clear idea in the morning of a recent outrage or scandal I plan to spend time informing myself about; and each of those days, that plan is blown apart by a fresh batch of outrages and scandals to try to understand.
    Every.
    Single.
    Day.
    It’s so overwhelming and depressing.

    • Eureka says:

      Every damn day.

      For this reason, yesterday I was reflecting on how important are headlines (and discernment tools for same). Sad, but true, to have to deploy shallow awareness tactics.

    • fpo says:

      Not pure, but positive, nonetheless, speculation follows:

      Headlines are a loaded topic for this WH – and its 2020 campaign.

      By any historical/conventional measures, a bi-partisan accomplishment like a DACA agreement and/or a comprehensive infrastructure bill (both of which receive majority support among the public) – and which championed a President – would deliver both (positive) headlines and votes for the party in the WH. And in this instance, particularly, independent votes.

      But these days, with the GOP and the WH having convinced themselves that success (i.e., survival) lies with relentless flogging of the Dems, their initiatives and thought-leaders both, we can anticipate another 18 months of baiting, pandering, lies and outrageous pranks – and the headlines that follow. Witness the latest idiotic threats to ship asylum seekers to sanctuary cities.

      Pelosi and company would do well to stay focused on the issues – healthcare, infrastructure, immigration, climate change, economic reforms, gun reform, etc. – and work tirelessly to get their efforts across to the MSM (and we can help there). Congressional hearings and fallout from Mueller’s work (particularly the Russian component), together with the deny/disrupt behavior by the GOP, will serve to erode support among independents for at-risk Senators and for Trump. Reasonable people don’t like being fooled and lied to (‘Tax break?’ – For who?). Trump’s base alone will not get him another four years. I am happy to see them go down this path.

      The Dems have a powerful tool to work with – the truth. It may not always grab headlines, but the cumulative effect, as evidenced in the 2018 midterms (think ‘healthcare’), can be significant. Let the outrage fuel your actions.

  5. sand says:

    Thanks Rayne for reminding me about one of the minor personal realizations that REALLY ticked me off about the shutdown. My employer uses e-Verify. The site was unavailable during the shutdown. Oh the irony of shutting down e-Verify to supposedly fight to enforce immigration policies.

    I’m sure it takes some resources to keep the site up and running, but it’s essentially an automated set of database queries, right? Did we really have to shut it down so that no new employee could be verified? Couldn’t the Gov’ment keep a skeleton crew in the office to keep the site up? I guess not.

    I’ll note that e-Verify requires registered employers to run checks for all new employees by the third day of employment. When the Gov’ment reopened, we ran the people that were hired during the shutdown through the system, using their legitimate first day of work. Normally, that would require us to indicate the reason that we had not run a timely check. However, when we hit enter, the system automatically changed the calculation and said that the employees had been checked on their first day, which wasn’t actually the case. There was no browser pop up with a warning or explanation, at least in our case. I understand the reason the system would make an exception, obviously, but I would have expected a pop-up explanation.

    Trump Org’s explanation that they were presented with fake docs and couldn’t have possibly known that their employees didn’t have proper work authorizations was beyond disingenuous. You could have used e-Verify bozos!! It’s a free service of DHS! Your tax dollars at work!

    Having the namesake of Trump.org take down the very system that his own org failed to use to try to help solve the supposed problems that he was pretending to try to solve was another nice plot piece for the Kafka novel that this country has become.

  6. Eureka says:

    (via) Julia Davis, this (15th) am. You can’t make this stuff up:

    Julia Davis: “Rusal — Oleg Deripaska’s company that was recently granted sanctions relief by Treasury — plans to invest $200 million in a Kentucky rolling mill that would be the largest new aluminum plant built in the U.S. in nearly four decades. #Russia (links to marketwatch article)”
    https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1117783281783668738

    “Rusal would supply the new mill with as much as 200,000 metric tons of foreign-made aluminum each year, most of it from an aluminum smelter under construction in Siberia. #Russia”
    [https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1117783395579441154]

    Commenter adds in replies: “From Siberia to Kentucky, huh? Whose ships are going to haul it? (links to ProPublica article about Elaine Chao’s family’s shipping company)”
    [https://twitter.com/AreDemos/status/1117803452753514497]

    Other related prior and potential future grifts and grafts are noted in the comments as well (funniest: ~~ the fucken’ wall will need to be lighter than steel: aluminum!).

    • Eureka says:

      Adding: JD also has a video of cows in RU grazing on a plastic debris-heaped field:

      Julia Davis: “No wonder Russian dairy looks like plastic. (video with RU(?) text narration)”
      https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1117819513100275712

      I can’t read it so don’t know the context, but it made me think of the value of functioning ‘administrative’ government systems at multiple scales. We take for granted here so many bureaucracies, in concert.

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