About a dozen staffers were fired from a golf course resort in New York owned by US President Donald Trump because they were undocumented immigrants, The Washington Post said in a report.

The fired staffers, all from Latin America, were told that Trump's company had just audited their immigration documents, the same ones they had submitted years earlier, and found them to be fake.

"Unfortunately, this means the club must end its employment relationship with you today," the Trump executive said, according to a recording that one worker made of her firing.

"I started to cry," Gabriel Sedano, a former maintenance worker from Mexico who was among those fired, told The Washington Post.

He had worked at the club since 2005.

"I had worked almost 15 years for them in this club, and I'd given the best of myself to this job... I'd never done anything wrong, only work," he added.

President Trump still owns his businesses, which include 16 golf courses and 11 hotels around the world.

He has given day-to-day control of the businesses to his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.

In a statement to The Washington Post, Eric Trump said: "We are making a broad effort to identify any employee who has given false and fraudulent documents to unlawfully gain employment. Where identified, any individual will be terminated immediately."

He added that it is one of the reasons "my father is fighting so hard for immigration reform. The system is broken".

However, he did not respond to specific questions about how many undocumented workers had been fired at other Trump properties and whether the company had, in the past, made similar audits of its employees' immigration paperwork.

The firings at the New York golf club follow a story in the New York Times last year that featured an undocumented worker at another Trump club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

After that story, Trump's company fired undocumented workers at the Bedminster club, according to former workers there.

--IANS

ksk/vm

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