The packed steamship S.S. Eider arrived in New York City’s Castle Garden, the country’s first immigration center, on Oct. 17, 1885. Hundreds of would-be Americans from Germany had traveled for 10 days across the North Atlantic to their new home. Among them was a skinny, light-haired 16-year-old boy who had left his home town, a small winemaking village where working hard meant just getting by.
Friedrich Trump stood on the deck, “waiting for his first glimpse of the New York Harbor,” author Gwenda Blair wrote in her 2001 book, “The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire.”
He did not have much; the young barber’s apprentice had brought only some clothes crammed in a small suitcase.
“He didn’t know English. He couldn’t possibly have known English,” Blair told The Washington Post. “He didn’t have anything like a high school diploma. He was literate, but in German.”
But his arrival marked the beginning of the Trump family’s life, adventure and misadventure in the United States. Years later, the teenager would begin amassing his fortune. He would marry Elizabeth Christ, a girl from his home town. Together they would have three children. Their second child, Fred Trump, would expand the family’s real estate portfolio by building housing developments in the 1940s and 1950s. He would marry Mary Anne MacLeod, and together, they would have five children. Their fourth child, Donald Trump, would become the most famous in the family, the 45th president of the United States whose hard-line immigration policies would have prevented his family’s patriarch from coming to the United States.
Under today’s policies, Friedrich Trump would have been considered an unaccompanied minor, or an “unaccompanied alien child,” experts say, unless his older sister, who was his only relative in the United States when he arrived, had been appointed as his guardian. But generally, said Ohio immigration attorney David Leopold, many unaccompanied minors arrive with relatives already in the country.