Kamala Harris
Kamala Devi Harris is an American politician and attorney who served as the 49th vice president of the United States from 2021 to 2025 under President Joe Biden. She is the first female, first African American, and first Asian American U.S. vice president, and the highest-ranking female and Asian American official in U.S. history. Harris represented California in the U.S. Senate from 2017 to 2021 and was the attorney general of California from 2011 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, she was the party's nominee in the 2024 presidential election.
Born in Oakland, California, Harris graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She began her law career in the office of the district attorney of Alameda County. Harris was recruited to the San Francisco District Attorney's Office and later to the office of the city attorney of San Francisco. She was elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003 and attorney general of California in 2010, and reelected as attorney general in 2014.
Harris was the junior U.S. senator from California from 2017 to 2021 after winning the 2016 Senate election. She was the second Black female and first South Asian American U.S. senator. As a senator, Harris advocated for stricter gun control laws, the DREAM Act, federal legalization of cannabis, and reforms to healthcare and taxation. She gained a national profile while asking pointed questions of officials from the first Trump administration during Senate hearings, including President Donald Trump's second U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. Harris sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, but withdrew from the race before the primaries. Biden selected her as his running mate; their ticket defeated the incumbent president and vice president, Trump and Mike Pence, in the 2020 presidential election. When her vice presidency began, Harris presided over an evenly split U.S. Senate. She cast 33 tie-breaking votes, more than any other vice president, including votes to pass the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act.
In July 2024, after Biden withdrew his candidacy from the 2024 presidential election, Harris quickly launched her own presidential campaign with his immediate endorsement. She later became the nominee and selected Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate. She lost the election to the Republican nominees, former president Trump and Ohio senator JD Vance.
Early life and career
Early life and education
Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California, on October 20, 1964. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was an Iyengar biologist who arrived in the United States from India in 1958 to enroll in graduate school in endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley. A research career of over 40 years followed, during which her work on the progesterone receptor gene led to advances in breast cancer research. Kamala's father, Donald J. Harris, is an Afro-Jamaican who immigrated to the United States in 1961 and also enrolled in UC Berkeley, specializing in development economics. The first Black scholar to be granted tenure at Stanford University's economics department, he has emeritus status there. Kamala's parents met in 1962 and married in 1963.The Harris family lived in Berkeley until they moved in 1966, around Kamala's second birthday. The Harrises lived for a few years in college towns in the Midwest where her parents held teaching or research positions: Urbana, Illinois ; Evanston, Illinois; and Madison, Wisconsin. By 1970, the marriage had faltered, and Shyamala moved back to Berkeley with her two daughters; the couple divorced when Kamala was seven.
During the early 1970s, Harris often went with her mother to Chennai, India, where they stayed with her maternal grandfather. She learned to wear traditional Indian dress and speak a few phrases of the Tamil language.
In 1972, Donald Harris accepted a position at Stanford University; Kamala and Maya spent weekends at his house in Palo Alto and lived at their mother's house in Berkeley during the week. Shyamala was friends with African-American intellectuals and activists in Oakland and Berkeley. In 1976, she accepted a research position at the McGill University School of Medicine, and moved with her daughters to Montreal, Quebec. Kamala graduated from Westmount High School on Montreal Island in 1981.
Kamala Harris attended Vanier College in Montreal in 1981–1982; she then attended Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C. At Howard, she became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, one of the "Divine Nine" historically black sororities. She graduated in 1986 with a degree in political science and economics. Harris then attended the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, where she served as president of its chapter of the Black Law Students Association. She graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1989.
Early career
In 1990, Harris was hired as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, California, where she was described as "an able prosecutor on the way up". In 1994, Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown, who was then dating Harris, appointed her to the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and later to the California Medical Assistance Commission. In February 1998, San Francisco district attorney Terence Hallinan recruited Harris as an assistant district attorney. There, she became the chief of the Career Criminal Division, supervising five other attorneys, where she prosecuted homicide, burglary, robbery, and sexual assault cases—particularly three-strikes cases. In August 2000, Harris took a job at San Francisco City Hall, working for city attorney Louise Renne. Harris ran the Family and Children's Services Division, representing child abuse and neglect cases. Renne endorsed Harris during her D.A. campaign.San Francisco district attorney (2002–2011)
In 2002, Harris ran for district attorney of San Francisco, running a "forceful" campaign and differentiating herself from Hallinan by attacking his performance. Harris won the election with 56% of the vote, becoming the first person of color elected district attorney of San Francisco. She ran unopposed for a second term in 2007.Within the first six months of taking office, Harris cleared 27 of 74 backlogged homicide cases. She also pushed for higher bail for criminal defendants involved in gun-related crimes, arguing that historically low bail encouraged outsiders to commit crimes in San Francisco. SFPD officers credited Harris with tightening the loopholes defendants had used in the past. During her campaign, Harris pledged never to seek the death penalty, and kept to this in the cases of a San Francisco Police Department officer, Isaac Espinoza, who was shot and killed in 2004, and of Edwin Ramos, an illegal immigrant and alleged MS-13 gang member who was accused of murdering a man and his two sons in 2009.
File:Kamala Harris with Barack Obama 2009-11-25.jpg|thumb|right|Harris with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, November 2009
Harris created a Hate Crimes Unit, focusing on hate crimes against LGBT children and teens in schools, and supported A.B. 1160, the Gwen Araujo Justice for Victims Act. As district attorney, she created an environmental crimes unit in 2005. Harris expressed support for San Francisco's sanctuary city policy of not inquiring about immigration status in the process of a criminal investigation. In 2004, she created the San Francisco Reentry Division. Over six years, the 200 people graduated from the program had a recidivism rate of less than 10%, compared to the 53% of California's drug offenders who returned to prison within two years of release.
In 2006, as part of an initiative to reduce the city's homicide rate, Harris led a citywide effort to combat truancy for at-risk elementary school youth in San Francisco. In 2008, declaring chronic truancy a matter of public safety and pointing out that the majority of prison inmates and homicide victims are dropouts or habitual truants, she issued citations against six parents whose children missed at least 50 days of school, the first time San Francisco prosecuted adults for student truancy. Harris's office ultimately prosecuted seven parents in three years, with none jailed. By April 2009, 1,330 elementary school students were habitual or chronic truants, down 23% from 1,730 in 2008, and from 2,517 in 2007 and 2,856 in 2006.
Attorney general of California (2011–2017)
Harris was elected attorney general of California in 2010, becoming the first woman, African American, and South Asian American to hold the office in the state's history. She took office on January 3, 2011, and was reelected in 2014. She served until resigning on January 3, 2017, to take her seat in the United States Senate.In 2010, Harris announced her candidacy for attorney general and was endorsed by prominent California Democrats, including U.S. senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and House speaker Nancy Pelosi. She won the Democratic primary and narrowly defeated Republican nominee Steve Cooley in the general election. Her tenure was marked by significant efforts in consumer protection, criminal justice reform, and privacy rights.
In 2014, Harris was reelected, defeating Republican nominee Ronald Gold with 58% of the vote. Her future opponent in the 2024 United States presidential election, Donald Trump, made two contributions to her reelection campaign totaling $6,000. In 2015, she donated Trump's contributions to a "nonprofit that advocates for civil and human rights for Central Americans."
During her second term, Harris expanded her focus on consumer protection, recovering billions for California consumers by securing major settlements against corporations like Quest Diagnostics, JPMorgan Chase, and Corinthian Colleges. She spearheaded the creation of the Homeowner Bill of Rights to combat aggressive foreclosure practices during the housing crisis, recording multiple nine-figure settlements against mortgage servicers. Harris also worked on privacy rights. She collaborated with major tech companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook to ensure that mobile apps disclosed their data-sharing practices. She created the Privacy Enforcement and Protection Unit, focusing on cyber privacy and data breaches. California secured settlements with companies like Comcast and Houzz for privacy violations.
Harris was instrumental in advancing criminal justice reform. She launched the Division of Recidivism Reduction and Re-Entry and implemented the Back on Track LA program, which provided educational and job training opportunities for nonviolent offenders. Despite her focus on reform, Harris faced criticism for defending the state's position in cases involving wrongful convictions and for her office's stance on prison labor. She continued to advocate for progressive reforms, including banning the gay panic defense in California courts and opposing Proposition 8, the state's same-sex marriage ban.