![]() ![]() How Melania Trump’s nude photos became an immigration scandal There are some people who’ve made claims that contradict the letter’s timeline (including some comments by Melania herself), but the "evidence" that started this whole controversy might have been one enormous mistake. (He justified his actions by telling CNN that US immigration laws "are archaic.")īut if the case in favor of Melania is coming from questionable sources, the case against her is weaker still. He’s admitted to helping Trump’s own defunct modeling agency, Trump Model Management, apply for H1-B visas for models by overstating how much the models would be paid - which appears to be a violation of immigration law in its own right. It’s fair to ask why the letter wasn’t signed by the lawyer who actually helped Melania through this process.Īnd it’s certainly fair to question Wildes’ credibility. It’s fair to ask why the Trump campaign didn’t publish this letter when questions began to come up about Melania’s immigration history over the summer. The earliest photo Getty has of Melania Knauss, from 1998 she was already on Trump’s arm. (The letter doesn’t mention this, because it’s not a fact anyone has disputed.) Melania then became a US citizen in 2006, after she married Donald Trump.In 2000, she applied for a green card for herself, and in March 2001, she became a lawful permanent resident (green-card holder) in the United States. ![]() She renewed her H1B visa every year until 2001.That visa allowed her to work legally in the US. In October 1996, she was issued an H1B work visa: something that’s generally used for "high-skilled" workers with college degrees, but which also has a subcategory set aside for fashion models.In August 1996, Melania first came to the US on a "business visitor" visa - a type of tourist visa that allowed her to stay in the US for several months, but didn’t allow her to work legally.Here’s the timeline the letter presented for Melania (then Melania Knauss): In September, Melania Trump tweeted out a letter, signed by lawyer Michael Wildes (a longtime associate of Donald Trump), testifying that he’d looked over her immigration records and hadn’t found anything indicating that at any time she’d violated US immigration law. What Melania Trump says about her immigration status Here’s what we know - and why there was such a brouhaha to begin with. And it definitely would be smarter to put out some documentation that might clear up the remaining questions about the credibility of Melania and the lawyer as sources.īut as it stands right now, there isn’t firm evidence suggesting that Melania Trump violated any US immigration law. It probably would have been smarter for the Trump campaign to put out the letter sooner, instead of allowing the controversy to fester for weeks. The news report that started the controversy, meanwhile, has been proven false in some important ways. Now, Melania Trump, through a lawyer, has released a letter that clears up some of the confusion, but not all of it. And there have been questions about how she went from modeling on a temporary visa to getting a green card to stay in the US, four years before she and Donald got married. There have been questions about what sort of immigration status she had when she first came to the US as a model in the mid-1990s - and over the summer, news of a nude photoshoot she did for a French magazine raised the possibility that she’d actually worked in the US illegally. But she’d been in the US for a decade before that, and her immigration history during that decade is a little murkier. Trump’s now a US citizen she was naturalized in 2006 after marrying Donald. ![]() Melania Trump, potential first lady of the United States, is an immigrant herself. Donald Trump, Republican nominee for president of the United States, got where he is by bashing immigrants. ![]()
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