After a campaign full of fierce vows to stop foreigners from entering the U.S. illegally, Donald Trump 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 U.S. 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 photo shoots and her own accounts of her travels have created questions about when she first entered the U.S. and whether she was legally permitted to work during her earliest days here.
Her original modeling agent in the U.S., Paolo Zampolli, said Thursday 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 U.S. for three years and do modeling work.
“She never worked illegally for our agency. She always worked with a visa,” Zampolli said in a phone interview. “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 questions about Melania Trump’s immigration history are particularly sensitive for Donald Trump, who has made attacks on immigrants a touchstone of his presidential campaign. Trump has characterized Mexican immigrants as rapists, vowed to keep out Muslims and promised to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.
The Trump campaign has not provided details of Melania’s visa history or released her records. On Thursday,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.
In interviews, Melania Trump has said she first came to the U.S. 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 February. “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.”