Did Barron Trump Benefit from Birthright Citizenship?

President Trump's children would still be U.S. citizens even if birthright citizenship were revoked, regardless of when or where they were born.

  • Published 3 November 2018


Donald Trump's son Barron became a U.S. citizen thanks to birthright citizenship.



On 30 October 2018, President Donald Trump asserted that he planned to sign an executive order to revoke birthright citizenship, the principle holding that all persons born in America are U.S. citizens, even if their parents are not.

While politicians and legal scholars weighed in about the constitutionality of such an executive order, some commenters on social media were more concerned with how the renouncing of birthright citizenship would have affected President Trump’s own family.

One Twitter user shared a “fun fact” claiming that Barron Trump, the son of Donald and Melania Trump, was a U.S. citizen only by virtue of the very constitutional principle his father wanted to eliminate:

But this “fact” wasn’t “fun,” nor was it a fact at all. Although the referenced dates were accurate — Barron Trump was born in March 2006, and his mother Melania, who came to the United States from Slovenia in 1996, didn’t become a United States citizen until four months later — the principle of birthright citizenship was misapplied to Barron Trump.

Birthright citizenship holds that any child born on United States soil, regardless of the nationalities of that child’s parents, becomes a U.S. citizen at birth. This constitutional principle stems from the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868, a few years after the end of the Civil War:




However, the 14 Amendment isn’t the only mechanism under which someone born in America to parents who are not both U.S. citizens may be considered a U.S. citizen from birth. Although Barron Trump’s mother Melania may not have been a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth, his father Donald certainly was. And according to current U.S. Citizenship and Naturalization laws, a child born outside the U.S. “acquires citizenship at birth if at the time of birth one parent is a foreign national and the other parent is a U.S. citizen,” and “the U.S. citizen parent was physically present in the United States for at least 5 years, including at least 2 years after 14 years of age.” Barron’s mother was a foreign national, and his father was a U.S. citizen who had lived in the United States for more than five years, so Barron would have become a U.S. citizen at birth even if he had not been born in the United States.

Regardless of his mother’s immigration status (or the existence of the 14th amendment), Barron Trump is, and always has been, a U.S. citizen. This same argument applies to Donald Trump’s other children, Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, who were also born before Ivana Trump, Donald Trump’s first wife, became an American citizen.