Weeks after campaign pledged answers, big questions about Melania Trump’s immigration status linger
Donald Trump’s immigration position is, at its heart, fairly simple. People in the country illegally will be subject to deportation if he is elected president, as he said in his speech this week in Arizona.
.. “Immigration law doesn’t exist for the purpose of keeping criminals out,” he said. “It exists to protect all aspects of American life — the work site, the welfare office, the education system and everything else.”
.. “The act of marrying a legal permanent resident of the United States doesn’t in and of itself do anything,” Leopold said.
.. A green card isn’t guaranteed to the new spouse, but it makes them eligible to begin the process.
.. that the coming in and going out, to anybody who’s been around this stuff, suggests that she was on a visitor visa, which doesn’t permit work,” he said. If Melania Trump came in on a visitor visa and began working over a short period of time, the government would assume that she entered the country fraudulently. If she told a customs official she was entering the United States as a visitor but was planning to work, that’s a material misrepresentation.
.. To get a work-related immigrant visa, Leopold added, Trump’s prospective employer would have had to prove that Trump filled a job duty that no American could fill — to show, in other words, that no other model in New York City would have done that shoot. Unless, of course, she had special skills — or a special degree.
.. You may remember that shortly before questions about Trump’s status arose, she suddenly took down her personal website. That change followedrevelations that Trump claimed to have a degree that biographers from Slovenia discovered she didn’t... We don’t know why Melania Trump claimed to have that degree — but having such degrees could bolster an argument for a work visa. If she told an employer she had degrees she didn’t to obtain a visa (and the employer wasn’t the wiser), Melania Trump is culpable… when you apply for citizenship, one of the questions they ask you is if have you ever sought to obtain immigration benefits from fraud. If you don’t ‘fess up and answer ‘yes’ if you’ve done that, now you have bad moral character and you’re ineligible for citizenship.” In the worst case, this could lead to denaturalization — loss of citizenship... In an interview with Univision, a former attorney for the Trump Organization said that Melania Trump obtained her green card in 2001 “based on marriage.” But she married Donald Trump in 2005 and has said that she wasn’t married previously.