Trump Business Attempted to Hire Nearly 200 Workers on Work Permits in 2025
The former president’s family business accelerated its hiring of overseas employees on short-term work permits this year, even as his government was creating barriers for other companies wanting to do the same, an analysis released Thursday claimed.
According to information from the federal labor department, the business sought to bring in at least nearly 200 overseas employees in the coming year for short-term roles at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort, two golf clubs and his Virginia winery.
The number of applications for temporary work visas covering workers including waitstaff, office assistants, housekeepers, kitchen staff and agricultural laborers was the record filed by the company, and up from over 120 in 2021, when Trump’s first term concluded.
It was also the fifth time in a decade that the former president had attempted to hire more than 100 overseas workers for temporary positions at Mar-a-Lago, according to labor statistics.
The disclosure comes amid a tightening on legal immigration by his administration that has involved the introduction of a $100,000 fee on H1-B visas; extra scrutiny of the activities of the 55 million people who possess American work permits; and tighter regulations for foreign students and journalists.
In total, the Trump Organization aimed to hire over 560 foreign laborers over the five years Trump has been in the presidency, from 2017 to 2021 and during 2025.
Significantly, the former president was criticized by some in the GOP this week for remarks justifying the need for foreign workers when a business was unable to find people with “particular skills” to occupy certain positions.
“You can’t just say a nation is coming in, going to invest $10bn to construct a plant, and going to take people off an jobless roster who have been unemployed in five years, and they’re going to start producing their defense systems. It isn’t feasible that effectively,” he stated to a interviewer after it was implied that overseas employees undercut the wages of US workers.
The administration refused a request for response, and the business did not provide an answer to an request for information.
