IS A BIRTH IN THE U.S. ENOUGH?
The Post & Email
by Sharon Rondeau
(Jan. 10, 2019) — Fox News and other sources reported early Thursday morning that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) plans to announce that she will run for president in 2020.
Harris has failed to answer questions about her parents’ citizenship at the time of her birth in 1964 in Oakland, CA. Her Wikipedia page says that her mother immigrated from India in 1960 and her father from Jamaica a year later. If accurate, neither could have resided in the United States for the requisite five years to apply for U.S. citizenship prior to Kamala’s birth.
Harris’s Wikipedia biography additionally states that she grew up in Canada from age 7 through high-school graduation, something she has not publicized on her Senate website.
Harris’s Senate office has not responded to queries from a constituent, Gary Wilmott, who first contacted her in December 2017 regarding her rumored plans to seek the presidency and whether or not her parents ever became U.S. citizens and if so, when.
The Post & Email’s follow-up article dated August 19, 2018 article titled, “Is Kamala Harris Eligible to be President?” continues to go viral on the web.
The Post & Email was unable to reach Harris’s office by phone on at least two occasions and received no response to an email last month asking similar questions about her constitutional eligibility for the Oval Office.
Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution requires that the president be a “natural born Citizen,” which appears to denote a higher level of allegiance than simply “a Citizen of the United States,” the requirement stated in Article I for U.S. representatives and senators as well as respective residency requirements.
The president must also be 35 years old or older and have resided in the United States for at least 14 years.
In 2007, Barack Hussein Obama’s eligibility began to be vigorously questioned given that credible, mainstream reports said he was born in Indonesia or Kenya and that Obama himself claimed a foreign-citizen father who never became a U.S. citizen. More recent reporting from a former detective who conducted a 5+-year investigation into a “long-form” birth certificate image posted at whitehouse.gov on April 27, 2011 said to be a scan of Obama’s original birth certificate from Hawaii revealed that two U.S. intelligence-community agents have averred that Obama’s foreign birth is “an open secret” in Washington, DC.
Two forensic experts agreed that the birth certificate image could not have originated with a real, paper document, Mike Zullo reported at a final press conference on December 15, 2016 stemming from the investigation spearheaded by former Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio.
Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential eligibility has also been questioned as a result of his birth in Canada to a then-Cuban-citizen father and presumed U.S.-citizen mother. Cruz has never substantiated even basic U.S. citizenship by releasing a copy of a Consular Report of Birth Abroad (CRBA), if his parents ever obtained one for him following his birth in Calgary, Alberta on December 22, 1970.
Citizenship information on anyone, including public figures, is not releasable to FOIA requesters, the State Department informed us. The same holds true for the Canadian government.
The late Sen. John McCain’s eligibility was the focus of scrutiny in both 2000 and again in 2008 when he sought the presidency due to his birth in Panama to U.S.-citizen parents, one of whom was an admiral in the Navy at the time.