‘Maybe He Ought to First Look at Melania’: Maxine Waters Takes Aim at First Lady and Her Parents While Ripping Into Trump’s Immigration Crackdown, Drawing Cryptic Reply from Elon Musk
Rep. Maxine Waters suggested that President Donald Trump should examine his wife’s citizenship during a protest where she tore into the president’s efforts to end automatic birthright citizenship and expel millions of people from the U.S.
Waters went viral after making a fierce public outcry at an anti-Department of Government Efficiency demonstration in Los Angeles on March 22.
“We are going to defend the Constitution because we believe in democracy,” the 86-year-old congresswoman said. “So many people have sacrificed and fought and died for democracy. And Trump comes along with his ignorant a— and he don’t even know the Constitution.”
During her speech, Waters lambasted the administration’s sweeping deportation initiatives and invoked First Lady Melania Trump’s name to make a point.
“If he wants to start looking so closely to find those who were born here and their parents were undocumented, maybe he ought to first look at Melania,” Waters said. “We don’t know whether or not her parents were documented. And maybe we better just take a look.”
According to her White House bio, Melania Trump was born in Slovenia in 1970 and moved to the U.S. in 1996 to pursue a modeling career.
She met Trump two years later, and the pair were married in 2005.
She was granted U.S. citizenship in 2006.
The first lady was initially granted entry to the U.S. on a visa. Her parents later moved to the country in 2018 on green cards she sponsored.
In Waters’ remarks, she pointed to the executive order Trump signed on his first day in office seeking to eradicate birthright citizenship.
“When [Trump] talks about birthright, and he’s going to undo the fact that the Constitution allows those who are born here, even if the parents are undocumented, they have a right to stay in America,” she said.
Trump’s order takes aim at the Fourteenth Amendment, which dictates that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The president wants to clarify that language and exclude citizens born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants or to people who were granted lawful, temporary entry into the country but never obtained permanent residency.
Judiciary officials immediately blocked the directive, putting Trump’s fight to end the citizenship protection on the road to landing in the Supreme Court.
News of Waters’ speech made waves on social media and even drew the attention of billionaire and DOGE head Elon Musk, who commented on X, “At some point, the many crimes of Maxine Waters will catch up to her.”
It’s unclear what crimes Musk is referring to since Waters has no criminal record.