Was Melania Trump an illegal foreign worker in US? Immigration history of candidate’s wife under scrutiny

After a campaign full of fierce vows to stop foreigners from entering the US 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 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 photo shoots 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 modelling agent in the US, 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 US for three years and do modelling 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.”