Melania Trump has been left outraged over the Department of Homeland Security’s ‘shocking’ decision to release her late mother’s immigration records, a family lawyer said.
The 166 pages of documents related to Amalija Knavs, who died in January aged 78, were made public amid the Heritage Foundation’s ongoing fight over Prince Harry’s visa application filings.
‘Mrs. Trump is rightfully upset,’ Knavs’s immigration lawyer Michael Wildes told DailyMail.com Wednesday.
‘She will be looking to explore retaliatory options to protect her family.’
The immigration file of Melania Trump’s Slovenian mother Amalija Knavs was released by think tank The Heritage Foundation amid its battle with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
The Washington, D.C.-based think tank has been demanding the DHS disclose U.S. visa records belonging to Prince Harry, who has been living in California since 2020
The Washington, D.C.-based think tank said the records were released in May, just 11 days after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request was submitted – raising questions from her family about how ‘such a sensitive disclosure’ was permitted.
Wildes expressed his ‘immense shock and displeasure’ at the release in a statement to DailyMail.com Tuesday’.
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‘This egregious and abhorrent violation of Ms. Knavs’s immigration file – including highly sensitive medical information and addresses that impact her family’s security- is an outlandish affront, not just to Ms. Knavs, and her family including former First Lady Melania Trump, but also to the very notions of confidentiality and privacy,’ the lawyer said.
‘That the DHS released Ms. Knavs’s immigration file after only 11 days further screams the impropriety of this request. How could the DOJ and Secret Service allow this breach?’
Wildes, who represented Knavs in her immigration case and was present when she was sworn in as a U.S. citizen in 2018, said the ‘shocking and completely unnecessary disclosure’ has ‘desecrated her memory.’
Knavs’s documents – obtained by DailyMail.com – include highly personal information such as her home address in her native Slovenia and multiple passports in full.
It also contains immunization and medical information revealing her negative HIV test result and her vaccination records for chickenpox and other diseases.
The Heritage Foundation had sought the Duke of Sussex’s immigration records through a FOIA request that was later denied.
The conservative organization plans to appeal the decision, and has now cited the release of Knavs’s file as grounds for making Harry’s public.
Heritage sued the Department of Homeland Security in 2023, demanding it turn over Harry’s immigration papers to show whether he had answered truthfully about his past drug use.
Attorney Michael Wildes (in red tie) was with Knavs and her husband when they went to their naturalization ceremony in New York in e2018. He expressed his ‘immense shock and displeasure’ at the privacy breach
Amalija Knavs, who died in January aged 78, became a naturalized citizen in a private ceremony in New York in August 2018 – the culmination of a nine year process
Knavs’s documents include highly personal information such as her home address in her native Slovenia and multiple passports in full
The British royal’s visa application was called into question following the release of his memoir in which he admitted to using various drugs recreationally – information he would’ve been required to disclose in immigration documents.
Harry wrote candidly about using cannabis, cocaine and magic mushrooms in his 2023 book, Spare, as well as discussing it on the Netflix docuseries with his wife Meghan Markle.
Yet the DHS had refused Heritage’s initial Freedom of Information (FOIA) request and subsequent efforts to obtain the Duke’s paperwork.
There is a fundamental difference in the cases as Knavs is dead and so her privacy issues are different to those of Harry.
Harry talked about using drugs such as cannabis, cocaine and magic mushrooms in his 2023 memoir, ‘Spare’, as well as on his Netflix TV series
Last month a judge in Washington dismissed the case for Harry’s files, but the foundation is now demanding that all the sealed materials be made public so it can mount a proper appeal.
On May 10 this year, Heritage put in a FOIA request for Knavs’s A-File, or alien file, from the DHS which handed it over 11 days later.
Samuel Dewey, a lawyer representing Heritage, wrote that the sort of State Department records it was seeking about Harry were ‘typically including in an A-File’ maintained by DHS.
Dewey wrote: ‘For example, the recently released A-File of Melania Trump’s mother contains a number of State Department forms’.
The former president and first lady announced early this year that Knavs had died at a hospital in Miami on January 9. They did not disclose her cause of death but Trump said his mother-in-law had been ‘very ill’ in late 2023.
Knavs was born in Austria in 1945. She spent time in both Austria and Slovenia – then part of Yugoslavia – during her childhood.
She and her husband Viktor, 80 – a fellow Slovenian native – became naturalized citizens in a private ceremony in New York in August 2018, the culmination of a nine year process.
Knavs officially obtained citizenship alongside her husband, Viktor, 80, another Slovenian native
The records contain a copy of Knavs’s U.S. Naturalization test, a standard exam on the country’s history and government given to all citizenship applicants
Knavs was born in 1945 in Judendorf-Strassengel, Austria, before moving to Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia, when it was still under communist rule
Her immunization and medical information revealed her negative HIV test result and her vaccination records for chickenpox and other diseases
It began in 2009 when Melania applied to make her parents Americans through a filing known as ‘chain migration’, which her husband has railed against in the past.
Despite the numerous redactions, there is plenty of personal information about Knavs that is still in the files.
In a form filled out in 2017, Knavs detailed her travels to and from the U.S. for the previous two years including four trips to Slovenia.
Knavs wrote that her maiden name was Ulcnik and her social security number, her date of birth as well as her Green Card are all copied into the file, as is her address in Slovenia.
In the paperwork, Knavs gave her address in the U.S. as the 66th floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan and Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, and said she was retired.
Knavs, who would have grown up under Tito’s Communist government in Yugoslavia, ticked no to all questions about whether she was ever a member of the Communist party or in a militia or terrorist organization.
By this point Knavs wrote that she could understand English but in a form filed in 2009 when her application was originally put in, she said she spoke Slovenian fluently but was learning English.
The A-file also contains a copy of Knavs’s U.S. Naturalization test, a standard exam on the country’s history and government given to all citizenship applicants.
Amalija and husband Viktor during their 2018 naturalization ceremony in New York
The former first lady’s mother passed away in the hospital on January 9, after she had been ‘very ill’ in late 2023. Her funeral was held in Palm Beach, Florida on January 18
Melania, 53, he younger of Amalija’s two daughters, missed the Trump family’s holiday celebrations at Mar-a-Lago last year to care for her ailing mother
Among the questions she answered were the minimum age to vote in elections and what the 13 stripes on the U.S. flag represent – both of which she answered correctly.
She responded with ‘no answer’ under a question asking ‘what is the ‘rule of law’?’
Knavs passed the English test during the interview when the US immigration officer asked her to write out sentences like: ‘Alaska is the largest state’.
Her earlier forms include some of her most personal details such as a medical examination form saying she was free of disease and not suffering any major medical conditions.
Among the other documents is a background check from authorities in Slovenia confirming that Knavs had a clean record.
The name of Knavs’s sponsor is redacted but it could well have been Trump who married Melania in 2005.
Knavs said ‘yes’ to pledge her allegiance to the US constitution and agreed that ‘if the law requires it’ she was ‘willing to bear arms on behalf of the United States’.
The dismissal of the case about Harry saves him from future embarrassing revelations about his personal life.
During the hearing in February, a lawyer for DHS claimed that Harry may have lied about his drug use to boost sales of ‘Spare’.
Assistant U.S. Attorney John Bardo told the court in Washington: ‘The book isn’t sworn testimony or proof.
‘Saying something in a book doesn’t necessarily make it true’.
In legal filings Heritage claimed that Harry’s discussion of drugs was so brazen it ‘approached the point of bragging and encouraging illegal drug use’.
DHS refused to hand the records over on the basis that they would breach the privacy of Harry, whose anecdotes in Spare included the time his penis got frostbitten.
The dismissal of the case also means that Harry will likely face less of a threat that Trump would kick him out of the country if he wins the election this year, as the former president has hinted he may do.