Why Donald Trump’s Base Shouldn’t Trust Him On Immigration
Populist voters banking on mass deportation may be setting themselves up for betrayal
Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Florida) spent this month celebrating. One year after she and Democrat Veronica Escobar introduced H.R. 4393, her office announced that the coalition behind the Dignity Act had passed 100 endorsements from employers, farm groups and faith leaders. Congress.gov now lists 39 co-sponsors, 19 of them Republicans.
Salazar introduced a first version in 2022, at the height of the border collapse. Her current bill offers a seven-year Dignity Program that shields eligible illegal aliens from deportation, lets them work and travel, and requires restitution payments. Salazar insists it stops short of citizenship. Though restrictionists call it amnesty with extra steps, and they correctly note that the bill also expands legal employment immigration.
The question the coalition avoids answering out loud is what President Donald Trump does if the bill reaches his desk. Populist voters who pulled the lever for him on the promise of mass deportation assume he will veto it. His own record points the other way, and that record began four decades before he ever gave a speech about the border.
In January 1980, Trump needed the Bonwit Teller building demolished fast so Trump Tower could rise. He hired a contractor—William Kaszycki of Kaszycki & Sons—whose crew of roughly 200 Polish laborers had no legal status. They worked 12-to 16-hour shifts without hard hats, gloves, or masks on an asbestos-filled site, earning as little as $4 an hour, less than half the union wage, and sometimes nothing at all when Kaszycki stopped paying. “We worked in horrid, terrible conditions,” one of them, Wojciech Kozak, told the New York Times. “We were frightened illegal immigrants and did not know enough about our rights.”
The workers sued in 1983. Trump spent 15 years denying he knew, then paid $1.375 million in 1998 to settle the case. The terms stayed sealed until Judge Loretta Preska unsealed them in 2017 in response to a motion by Time Inc. and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
The pattern repeated in a very different corner of Trump’s business. Trump Model Management put three foreign models to work on tourist visas carrying no work authorization and coached them on what to say at the border. One model given the pseudonym Anna recalled the instruction: “If they [immigration officials] ask you any questions, you’re just here for meetings.” Canadian model Rachel Blais produced a financial statement showing a six-month gap between the start of her employment and the date the agency obtained her work visa. “It is like modern-day slavery,” Blais told Mother Jones. The Trump Organization denied the allegations and closed the agency in 2017.
The pattern surfaced yet again, this time at Trump’s own retreat. In December 2018 the New York Times found two women at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster who had worked there without status, cleaning Trump’s villa and washing his clothes. Victorina Morales said a manager helped her obtain forged documents. “We are tired of the abuse, the insults, the way he talks about us when he knows that we are here helping him make money,” she told the paper.
Eric Trump told reporters the company was “making a broad effort to identify any employee who has given false and fraudulent documents to unlawfully gain employment,” saying any such individuals would be immediately fired. Within two months the organization fired at least 18 illegal workers across five golf courses in New York and New Jersey, some who had worked there for a dozen or more years, and pledged to institute E-Verify across all its properties.
The purge missed a unit. In August 2019, the Washington Post revealed that Mobile Payroll Construction LLC, a Trump-owned company, had spent nearly two decades moving a roving crew of Latin American laborers—who built fountains, waterfalls, rock walls, and cart path bridges at Trump’s winery and golf courses from New York to Florida—across his properties. For years, the crew had included workers who entered the country illegally. Other employees at the Trump clubs nicknamed them Los Picapiedras (Flintstones).
Where the illegal labor stopped, the visa applications continued. Labor Department data reviewed by Forbes shows the Trump Organization has sought 2,033 foreign workers through the H-2A and H-2B programs since 2008, including at least 566 during his years in office. In 2025 it requested a record 184 for Mar-a-Lago, two golf clubs and Trump Vineyard Estates, up from 121 in 2021. The jobs pay between $15.58 and $27.91 an hour, mostly servers, cooks, housekeepers and farm workers, and the Guardian noted that Mar-a-Lago has sought more than 100 seasonal foreign workers five times in a decade. Trump defended the practice on Fox News, telling Laura Ingraham the country lacks people with “certain talents” and that “you also do have to bring in talent.”
The political record matches the business record. On June 12, 2025, Trump posted on Truth Social that farmers and hotel operators say his enforcement “is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” adding “We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!” At a bill-signing ceremony that same day he expanded on it: “They have very good workers. They’ve worked for them for 20 years; they’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be ... great, and we’re going to have to do something about that.” Within days ICE paused worksite arrests in agriculture, restaurants, and hotels, then reversed the pause. Weeks later he floated a temporary pass for those industries, saying growers would keep control instead of watching agents “walk in and take everybody away.”
His posture on DACA recipients runs the same way. During his first term, Trump ended DACA in September 2017 while giving Congress six months to replace it with legislation—posting on Twitter that he would “revisit” the issue if lawmakers failed. Then he undermined each attempt they made. On January 11, 2018, Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Lindsey Graham brought him a Gang of Six compromise that included a path to citizenship, $1.6 billion in border security, an end to the diversity visa lottery, and limits on family sponsorships; Trump rejected it on the spot. Days later, Schumer offered Trump upward of $20 billion for his border wall in exchange for a citizenship pathway—Trump rejected that too, triggering a government shutdown, and the White House walked back the deal within hours. On February 15, 2018, the Senate voted on four immigration amendments simultaneously. Two had bipartisan support: the Rounds-King amendment, brokered by Susan Collins and the Common Sense Coalition, offered a 12-year citizenship path for 1.8 million Dreamers with $25 billion in border security; the McCain-Coons amendment offered a narrower DACA fix. None reached the 60-vote threshold.
Trump then re-opened the door in December 2024. “I will work with the Democrats on a plan,” he told Meet the Press. “And if we can come up with a plan, but the Democrats have made it very, very difficult to do anything. Republicans are very open to the Dreamers.”
The through-line across every episode is that Trump treats DACA as a bargaining chip, not a settled principle. He is willing to embrace immigration expansion when the right concessions are on the table.
Beyond rhetoric, Trump’s immigration track record has been lackluster to say the least. According to the Migration Policy Institute, measured against the full record from Fiscal Year 1977 through Fiscal Year 2024, Donald Trump’s first term stands third in total naturalizations, with roughly 2.94 million migrants sworn in as U.S. citizens. Only Joe Biden’s term (3.475 million) and George W. Bush’s second term (3 million naturalizations) surpassed Trump’s numbers, placing his administration firmly within the high naturalization pattern shared by both political parties. If history is any guide, these trends will likely continue well into Trump’s second term.
Being shaky on immigration restriction is not unique to Trump. Republicans who campaign on employer sanctions keep getting caught employing the workers they promise to remove. Several cases are revelatory:
Michael Huffington (Representative and Senate nominee, California, 1994). He employed an illegal alien as a nanny in Santa Barbara from 1989 to 1993 while running against Dianne Feinstein and championing Proposition 187. He narrowly lost.
Mitt Romney (Presidential candidate, 2012). The Boston Globe reported he used a landscaping firm staffed by illegal Guatemalan workers at his Belmont estate for roughly a decade, then found them still there a year later, prompting Romney to fire the contractor. Rick Perry hit him with it in a 2011 debate.
Meg Whitman (gubernatorial nominee, California, 2010). She employed housekeeper Nicky Diaz Santillan for nine years and fired her in 2009 after learning her status, then settled a wage claim for $5,500 without admitting wrongdoing. She had campaigned on fining employers who hire illegal aliens.
Liz and Dick Uihlein (Trump megadonors, 2024 to 2026). The Guardian reported that their company Uline ran a shuttle program bringing Mexican employees to warehouses in Wisconsin, Florida and Pennsylvania on tourist and B-1 training visas, then assigning them regular shifts. Immigration lawyers told the paper the practice was illegal. Sources say it ended in 2024 after the first story ran, and a Milwaukee official has demanded an investigation. Richard Uihlein gave roughly $59 million to Restoration PAC in 2024.
Flemming Larsen (congressional candidate, Nevada, 2024). Running in Nevada’s first district, the restaurant owner said on tape that he employs “a lot of illegals” at his California restaurants, audio the Nevada Independent obtained.
Rick Jackson (gubernatorial nominee, Georgia, 2026). A workers compensation filing revealed that Jackson’s Cumming estate relied on landscapers without work authorization for years, and he conceded in depositions that he never ran I-9 checks. Pressed at the April debate by Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones on whether illegal aliens work for him right now, Jackson answered, “I don’t know.” He defeated rival Burt Jones in the June runoff.
Moreover, as this author has previously documented, Republican-controlled states like Florida and Texas have presided over sweeping racial demographic shifts driven by mass migration over the last 40 years. A party’s commitment to immigration restriction should be judged by its results, not by bombastic campaign promises, and by that standard, the party at every level of government has been an abject failure at putting the clamps on mass migration.
As Salazar’s amnesty bill gradually gains traction and Trump continues to demonstrate that he cannot be trusted as a committed immigration restrictionist, it is entirely plausible that he could leave his voters with a nasty parting gift in the lame duck phase of his second term by signing an amnesty into law. Just as only Nixon could go to China, only Trump possesses the political capital and hypnotic appeal among large parts of his base to force through an amnesty betrayal that any sane populist would correctly identify as such.
When looking at the standard Republican’s actions both in their business and political affairs, they simply can’t be trusted to deliver the goods on implementing any durable immigration restriction package.
NEXT:
Why Immigration Restriction is DOA in Congress
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) announced on May 14, 2026 the introduction of his 83 page ASSIMILATION Act, legislation he claims would “GUT the Hart-Celler Act of 1965” and “scrap provisions of the Immigration Act of the 1990s.”
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