The legal adviser and spokesperson for President Trump’s re-election campaign questioned the citizenship of Sen. Kamala D. Harris, a California native and the presumptive Democratic nominee for vice president.

Later in the day, Trump said Harris possibly “doesn’t meet the requirements” to serve as vice president.

Harris’s citizenship is not under any serious question, legal experts told us.
For years, and as a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump stoked the “birther” conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Now, the citizenship of another prominent African American politician is being challenged with no evidence.

Harris was born in Oakland, Calif., on Oct. 20, 1964. The 14th Amendment and a Supreme Court decision from 1898 give citizenship to people born in the territorial United States, according to constitutional law experts.

Trump perhaps knows this, because he announced in 2018 that he would try to end birthright citizenship with an executive order, which was never released.

The Facts

The Constitution requires the president and vice president to be natural-born U.S. citizens and at least 35 years old.

The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, repudiating the Supreme Court’s 7-to-2 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford , an 1857 ruling that denied citizenship to people of African descent born in the United States.

“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 amendment says.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1898 that this right to citizenship covered Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco to Chinese nationals legally residing in the United States.

Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was born in India and came to the United States at age 25 to earn a PhD in nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California at Berkeley.

Her father, Donald Harris, who is Black, arrived from Jamaica in 1963 to earn a PhD in economics from UC-Berkeley.