Politics - News Analysis White House Silent After Proof Emerges That Melania Trump Worked Illegally When She Came to the US

After a campaign and presidency full of fierce vows to stop foreigners from entering the US illegally, Donald Trump’s White House is now facing an immigration controversy close to home.

Trump’s wife, Melania, who was born in what is now Slovenia and worked as a New York fashion model in the mid-1990s, has held herself up as an example of an immigrant who came to the US legally and followed the law. She said she applied for a green card and eventually obtained U.S. citizenship.

But the timing of her early photoshoots and her own accounts of her travels have created questions about when she first entered the US and whether she was legally permitted to work during her earliest days here.

Her original modeling agent in the US, Paolo Zampolli, said that he recruited her to come to New York from Milan and helped her obtain an H1-B visa, which allowed her to stay in the US for three years and do modeling work.

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“She never worked illegally for our agency. She always worked with a visa,” Zampolli said. “It’s very easy, very standard, to get a model visa, because she had experience in Europe. Trust me, I don’t want to be lying about this. She had a visa.”

The Trump campaign has not provided details of Melania’s visa history or released her records. Following a report on Politico, she released a statement saying she had always followed the rules. She said she obtained a green card in 2001 and became a U.S. citizen in 2006.

“Let me set the record straight: I have at all times been in full compliance with the immigration laws of this country,” she said on Twitter, after questions about her history were raised in news reports. “Any allegation to the contrary is simply untrue.”

Questions about her immigration status surfaced in the wake of the publication of nude photos taken in New York in 1995, when then-Melania Knauss was 25.

The photos show Melania completely nude, some of her with another woman.

But in interviews, Melania Trump has said she first came to the US in 1996, and that she periodically traveled back to Slovenia in order to stay in compliance with visa rules.

“I followed the law the way it’s supposed to be,” she said on MSNBC in 2016. “I never thought to stay here without papers. I had a visa. I traveled every few months back to the country to Slovenia, to stamp the visa.”

“I came back, I applied for the green card,” she said. “I applied for the citizenship later on.… So I went by the system.”

The statements raise two issues. First, the photographs suggest she was working in the US earlier than she had previously claimed.

Second, if Melania Trump had held an H1-B visa used for working in the US, she would have been allowed to stay for three years and would not have needed to return to her home country, immigration experts said.

Her description of going back and forth from New York and Slovenia is more consistent with a B-1 tourist visa. But such a visa doesn’t permit the person to work, David Leopold, an immigration lawyer in Cleveland, said in an interview.

It is technically fraudulent for a traveler to tell a US immigration officer that a trip is for tourism if he or she is really coming for a job, Leopold said. Such a misrepresentation might even be cause to strip someone’s green card or citizenship, if they did not disclose it at the time they applied for changing their immigration status, Leopold said.

But such violations are common and rarely prosecuted.

“If Melania would release her immigration file, all the questions would be answered,” Leopold said, adding that there’s “no reason not to release the immigration file.”