Claim:
The U.S. Senate passed a “Born in America Act” authored by Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., that required every federal officeholder to be a natural-born U.S. citizen, stripping naturalized citizens and anyone with dual citizenship of their positions, as claimed in November 2025 post.
Rating:
In November 2025, days after The Associated Press reported that the U.S. Supreme Court met to discuss hearing a case on President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, a Facebook page claimed a change of citizenship rules for federal officeholders had the “immediate fallout” of stripping naturalized citizens and anyone with dual citizenship of their positions.
The post (archived) claimed the Senate passed Republican Sen. John Kennedy’s “Born in America Act,” which purportedly required “every federal officeholder to be a natural-born U.S. citizen who has never held dual citizenship.”
According to the post, 14 House members, three senators and two Cabinet secretaries were “escorted out by Capitol Police live on C-SPAN” because they were naturalized citizens — meaning they were not born U.S. citizens but instead became citizens later by going through the naturalization process. (The post did not specify from where those people were allegedly escorted.) Its full text was as follows:
A constitutional crisis erupted in Washington as Senator John Neely Kennedy’s “Born In America Act” passed the Senate in a razor-thin 51–49 vote, sealed by the Vice President’s tiebreaker. The legislation requires every federal officeholder to be a natural-born U.S. citizen who has never held dual citizenship. Effective at midnight, the law strips naturalized citizens of their positions and permanently bars anyone with dual citizenship—past or present—from serving in Congress, the Cabinet, the judiciary, or even as a postal inspector.
Kennedy delivered the measure with chilling resolve. “The Constitution says natural-born for President. I just made it the law for everybody. If you weren’t born on this soil, you don’t run this soil. Period,” he declared from the Senate floor.
The fallout was immediate. Fourteen House members, three senators, and two Cabinet secretaries—all naturalized citizens—were escorted out by Capitol Police live on C-SPAN. Federal marshals were reportedly dispatched to enforce resignations among justices and governors. Current officeholders have been given 72 hours to step down or face arrest.
The political shockwave reverberated across the nation. At 11:59 p.m., President Trump posted: “Biggest win ever. America First just became America ONLY.” Within minutes, a 41-second clip of Kennedy’s gavel strike and declaration went viral, amassing 61.4 billion views in just one hour. The hashtag #BornInAmericaAct overwhelmed servers worldwide, generating an unprecedented 912 billion impressions.
Tonight, the republic did more than pass a law—it redefined belonging itself. Midnight has struck, and millions of Americans suddenly find themselves strangers in their own country.
Multiple versions of the claim (archived) spread around social media sites, largely Facebook (archived) and Instagram (archived). Searches for Kennedy and the “Born in America Act” on Google surged after the claim spread across social media.
The story was made-up and included multiple inconsistencies. As such, we’ve rated the claim false.
Snopes count not find a bill called the “Born in America Act” through a search on Congress.gov (archived), which keeps a record of all bills introduced to the House of Representatives and the Senate. Similarly, a Congress.gov search for legislation sponsored by Kennedy (archived) revealed no bill with that name or any similar bill. If such a bill or law was introduced and passed by the Senate, the Congress.gov website would have a record of it.
Just to be safe, Snopes also searched for the act on Google. The search did not reveal any news reports on the legislation. If C-SPAN had recorded footage of something as visibly dramatic as the Capitol Police escorting more than a dozen members of Congress out of their offices, mainstream political news sources would have covered the event and the law that caused it.
The closest Snopes could find to the “Born in America Act” was the so-called “Born in the USA Act,” a bill meant to shut down Trump’s executive order doing away with birthright citizenship, which Democratic members of the House introduced earlier this year. That bill was never voted on.
The U.S. Report, the Facebook page that posted the widely shared version of the claim, posted a strikingly similar claim (archived) the very next day. In that story, “Senator Marco Rubio” apparently introduced the Born in America Act. At the time of the post, Rubio was the secretary of state and hadn’t been a senator in almost a year.
The details of the story also hinted at the rumor being made-up.
In the very first sentence, the story claimed that the vice president’s tiebreaker “sealed” a razor-thin 51-49 vote. However, the vice president can only vote to break a tied vote, and thus all votes with vice-presidential tiebreaks have a one-vote margin. That means the final tally would have been 51-50 or 50-49 had the vice president actually stepped in to break a tie.
The rumor also suggested that Kennedy, a senator from Louisiana, introduced the bill and it passed the Senate. It makes no mention of the bill passing the House and being signed by the president, both of which would be requirements before the law could have “immediate fallout.”
The post included a made-up quote from Kennedy referencing the U.S. Constitution. It’s true the Constitution requires the president to be a natural-born citizen. However, the Constitution clearly allows for naturalized citizens to members of Congress: It says each member of the House of Representatives must be at least 25 years old and a citizen for at least seven years and that each senator must be at least 30 years old and a citizen for at least nine years. It’s therefore likely that a constitutional amendment would be necessary to bar naturalized citizens from Congress, and a constitutional amendment requires ratification by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states.
The story went on to claim federal marshals enforced the resignations of governors, even though governors hold state, not federal, office. It also claimed the law would bar anyone with dual citizenship from federal office even though none of the quotes or purported resignations targeted dual citizens. However, a person can be a natural-born U.S. citizen with dual citizenship; the State Department says a citizen “may naturalize in a foreign state without any risk to their U.S. citizenship.”
And finally, while technically not impossible, the numbers concerning viewership and impressions mentioned in the post made little sense. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that there were 8.156 billion people in the world and 342 million people in the U.S. on Nov. 26, 2025. In order for the clip described in the post to reach 61.4 billion views, every person on Earth, including infants and people without internet access, would have had to watch the 41-second clip more than seven times, all within a single hour. Every person on Earth would have to view the hashtag #BornInAmericaAct more than 111 times apiece for it to rack up 912 billion impressions in total.
But more realistically, the majority of the clip’s views and the hashtag’s impressions would likely come from Americans. So if we assume the clip’s viewers were every single person in the U.S. instead of the world, each American would have had to watch the clip over 179 times in one hour. And if we assume the same for the 912 billion impressions on the hashtag, every American would have had to see the hashtag more than 2,666 times.
The post was right that those numbers would be “unprecedented” if they reflected reality.
This wasn’t the first false story involving Kennedy we’ve fact-checked. For example, we also looked into a rumor that the senator’s son was battling pancreatic cancer.
