An unaccompanied migrant minor: this is how Donald Trump's grandfather arrived in the United States, Friedrich Trump
He looked like an immigrant like any other.
He arrived in New York after a long and hard journey of several days with the intention of seeking his fortune to send money to the family - mother and four brothers - that he had left in his hometown.
He did not know English and also, like so many other immigrants, he was welcomed for several years in the home of an older sister who had settled in the United States before him.
His legacy, however, would be very different from that of others.
122 years after his arrival in the center of Castle Garden, in the southern tip of Manhattan, his grandson would become the 45th president of the United States: Donald Trump.
An economic migrant
Friedrich Trump (or Trumpf, as his surname was recorded when he arrived on the new continent) was 16 years old when on October 19, 1885, he saw for the first time the New York Bay, where at that time the city was still being assembled. Statue of Liberty.
He had made a journey of about 10 days from the city of Bremen aboard the passenger ship S.S. Eider.
He had a steerage ticket, a category equivalent to third class, which means that he did not have a room but was traveling in an open space where all the passengers were together without any privacy.
"I had a cot to sleep on and, on days when the sea was calm, I would receive a meal. Nothing sophisticated," Gwenda Blair, author of the book The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President, tells BBC Mundo. Trump: Three Generations of Builders and a President).
It is unlikely that it would have been a pleasant trip.
Passengers traveling in that category spent almost two weeks locked in an area with no bathrooms, no showers, or anything. And when they got dizzy, they would throw up all over the place, which, according to Blair, explains the fact that at that time there was a lot of talk about the bad smell of newcomers.
Trump traveled alone, without the company of an adult, but he had a clear purpose.
"He was an economic immigrant. It is not necessary to guess because he said that he emigrated to earn money to help his mother. He and his older sister sent remittances," adds the biographer, who points out that later another sister would follow in their footsteps.
The family had some land in Kallstadt, a small wine town that then had fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, but they were left with large debts when the father died.
Faced with difficulties paying the bills and feeding so many mouths, Friedrich's mother Katherine sent him to a nearby city to learn the trade of barber.
After two and a half years, working seven days a week from sunrise to sunset to pay for his training and living, the young man returned to his town only to discover that Kallstadt was too small a town to need another barber. .
Faced with an unpromising future and the prospect of having to do military service for three years, the young man chose to leave home one night for the new world, leaving a note for his mother in which he explained the reasons for he.
Mine the miners
Upon arriving in New York, Friedrich was greeted by her sister Katherine hers and her husband, Fred Schuster, also a native of Kallstadt, who welcomed him into her home on New York's Lower East Side.
"At the time, it was an area of the city very populated by immigrants, in which many languages other than English were spoken, mainly German. It would be like what Spanish Harlem is today for someone who comes from El Salvador," says Blair.
After working as a barber those early years, Friedrich leaves New York to try his luck in the Northwest.
First, he settled in Seattle, where in 1892 he first voted in a presidential election, just after he became a US citizen.
At that time, the naturalization process was extremely simple: it was only required to have lived 7 years in the country and provide the testimony of someone who could attest that the applicant had "good character."
When he was nationalized, he also took the opportunity to change his name. From now on he would be called: Frederick Trump.
In Seattle, he also changed his economic activity, leaving his job as a barber to dedicate himself to opening restaurants and small hotels to serve the large number of people who were arriving in that area of the country.
"Over the next 8 years, he opened various food outlets. First in Seattle and then in the Yukon, in various towns where there was the gold rush. He did what was called 'mining the miners.'
"He never worked in the mines but served those who did. That's why he moved to the places where they were," Blair said.
"He ended up doing very well. When he left the Yukon in 1900 he had a fortune that would be worth the equivalent of about $ 500,000 today," he added.
Rich and deported
A wealthy man, Trump returned to Kallstadt for the first time in 15 years, where he met Elizabeth Christ, the daughter of a neighbor in the family home who was 11 years his junior.
In August 1902, the couple married and moved to New York, where his first daughter was born and Frederick would return to work as a barber and as a hotel and restaurant manager.
But Elizabeth missed Germany so in 1904 they returned there with the intention of finally settling down.
Things, however, did not turn out as planned.
In 1905, Frederick received a letter from the Bavarian authorities denying his request for repatriation and ordering him to leave the country within eight weeks.
The reason?
They considered that his trip to the United States, which had occurred 20 years earlier, had the objective of avoiding compulsory military service, an offense that was punishable by the loss of German citizenship.
Furthermore, he had failed to comply with the obligation to notify the authorities of his intention to leave the country.
Desperate, Frederick wrote a letter addressed to Leopold, Prince Regent of Bavaria, in which he begged him to allow them to remain in the country.
Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard for a family. What will our fellow citizens think if honest people have to face such a decree? "
Frederick Trump. Letter to Prince Leopold of Bavaria.
In the text he recounted how he had become rich in America and how his Kallstadt neighbors "were glad to have received a capable and productive citizen."
"Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard on a family. What will our fellow citizens think if honest people have to face such a decree, not to mention the great economic losses it will cause?" Trump wrote.
His pleas were in vain.
By June 1905, they were back in New York.
Shortly after, Frederick Christ Trump, the father of the current president of the United States, would be born.
After his return, Frederick went back to working as a barber for a time until he started a small real estate business.
He began buying land and small properties in Queens, an area of the city that would rapidly urbanize in the following years and that would be the seed of the future real estate empire that he could not develop when he died of a flu epidemic in 1918.
He had arrived in the country with a suitcase and a third-class ticket.
He now he left his family well-off. As an immigrant he had fulfilled his American dream.
