What month did Melania Trump receive her citizenship?
Donald Trump made anti-immigration sentiment a driving force of his 2016 presidential campaign, just he continues to rail against illegal immigration as part of a broader strategy to reduce the flow of foreigners coming into the United States.
And yet, his Slovenian-born wife, Melania, is an immigrant who has never been fully transparent about her own immigrant journey, writes Mary Jordan, the author “The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump.”
This lack of transparency has led to ongoing questions about whether there is “something improper” about how the former Melania Knauss came to the United States, said Jordan in her new biography of America’s sphinx-like first lady.
Jordan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post political reporter, noted that Trump’s hardline immigration policies have succeeded in dramatically reducing the number of people allowed to move to the United States. In 2018, the number of immigrants had dropped 70 percent from the prior year.
Meanwhile, Donald and Melania Trump have failed to publicly produce records about the first lady’s immigration to the United States, including any paperwork detailing how she obtained the so-called “Einstein visa” in 2001. After marrying Trump in 2005 and giving birth to their son, Barron, Melania Trump became a U.S. citizen in 2006.
In August 2016, Trump’s presidential campaign promised to hold a press conference that would set the record straight about Melania’s path to lawful permanent residency and citizenship. The promise was made after nude photos of her were splashed across the cover and inside pages of the New York Post.
“They said my wife Melania might have come in illegally,” Trump said during a campaign rally in North Carolina that month. “Can you believe that one?”
But the promised press conference never happened, Jordan noted. Neither did the release of her immigration records. Jordan spoke to attorney Michael Wildes, who has been designated by the Trumps to address questions about Melania’s immigration, even though he didn’t handle her original visa and green card applications.
WIldes told Jordan that Melania Knauss arrived in New York City in August 1996 to pursue a career in modeling. Two months later, she obtained an H-1B visa that allowed her to work in the United States for a year. She was able to obtain five H-1B visas over the next five years.
In March 2001, she received an “Einstein visa,” issued through the “elite” EB-1 program. Jordan reported that, in 2001, such visas were handed out to just 1 percent of non-U.S. citizens, and only to those who possessed “extraordinary ability,” such as renowned academics, multinational business executives, Olympic athletes and Oscar-winning actors.
It’s not known what Melania Trump claimed about her modeling career on her green card application to show “extraordinary ability,” Jordan wrote.
Before and after Melania started dating Trump, sometime around 1998, she had never reached the echelon of “editorial” models who book the high-end gigs for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, or Marie Claire, Jordan reported.
Photographer Matthew Atanian, who was Melania’s roommate during her struggling-model days, told Jordan that Melania was a “commercial” model at best. And, as a commercial model, Attanian and others explained, Melania could never be considered a “supermodel” — not like her idols Paulina Porizkova, Claudia Schiffer or Linda Evangelista.
However, that didn’t stop Trump from introducing Melania as a supermodel after they became an item. Melania’s relationship with Trump also helped her to book some higher-profile modeling gigs, according to Jordan. By 2000, Melania’s major modeling accomplishments included an ad for Camel cigarettes that put her on a billboard in Times Square and a photo in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.
“But did that add up to extraordinary ability?” Jordan said she asked Wildes.
“There is no reason to adjudicate her petition publicly when her privacy is so important to her,” WIldes replied, according to Jordan.
Immigration attorney David Leopold disagreed that Melania Trump is owed privacy on this issue. As the wife of a president, whose rhetoric demonizes people coming to the United States illegally, she should be more forthcoming, he said.
Jordan also cited an Associated Press report, published a few days before the 2016 presidential election, which showed that Melania earned up to $20,000 for 10 modeling gigs before she received her visa to work in 1996.
“There are a lot of questions about how she procured entry into the United States,” Leopold, a past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told Jordan.
Questions also surround the way in which Melania Trump was able to help her parents, Viktor and Amalija Knauss, become U.S. citizens.
Jordan reports on Trump railing against “chain migration” at a rally on Aug. 4, 2018.
“And how about chain migration? How about that?” the president said, eliciting a loud chorus of boos from the crowd.
Five days later, Trump’s Slovenian-born mother- and father-in-law were celebrating their naturalization ceremony at the federal building in Manhattan, Jordan wrote, noting the irony.
Wildes insisted that Melania’s parents received no special treatment, in terms of the application or review process. Jordan wrote that Melania began working with an immigration lawyer in 2006 to begin the process of “chain migration” for both her parents and her sister. But it was only after Trump became president that Melania’s parents joined her as naturalized U.S. citizens and her sister became a permanent legal resident.
The day after Viktor and Amalija Knauss became citizens, Wildes appeared on CNN to speak in favor of family reunification, Jordan wrote. He revealed that the first lady told him before the interview, “Make it clear that I need babysitting. If I am going to do the work for the nation, I want to make sure my son is in the hands of my parents and they have the right to be here permanently.”
