Kamala Harris is the junior United States Senator for California since 2017. And a strong opposition to Trump’s Mexican border wall.
Her spirited statements about the shutdown has brought her to forefront again.
So let’s see some amazing facts about her!
- Her full name is Kamala Devi Harris
- She was born October 20, 1964
- Kamala is an American lawyer and politician
- She is serving as the junior United States Senator for California since 2017
- She is a member of the Democratic Party
- She has served as the 32nd Attorney General of California from 2011 to 2017
- And as DA of San Francisco
- Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California
- Harris is a graduate of Howard University
- And the University of California, Hastings College of the Law
- In the 1990s, Harris worked in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and the City Attorney of San Francisco’s office
- In 2004, Harris was elected District Attorney of San Francisco
- Kamala Harris was narrowly elected as California’s Attorney General in 2010
- And in 2014 she was reelected by a wide margin
- On November 8, 2016, she defeated Loretta Sanchez in the 2016 Senate election to succeed outgoing Senator Barbara Boxer
- With that she became California’s third female U.S. Senator
- The first of Indian descent
- The first of Jamaican descent
- Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a breast cancer scientist who immigrated to the US from Madras (now Chennai) in 1960
- Her father, Donald Harris, is a Stanford University economics professor who immigrated from Jamaica in 1961 for graduate study in economics at University of California, Berkeley
- Her name, Kamala, comes from the Sanskrit word for lotus
- She was extremely close to her maternal grandfather, P. V. Gopalan, an Indian diplomat
- As a child, she frequently visited her extended family in the Besant Nagar neighborhood of Chennai, Tamil Nadu.
- She has one younger sister, Maya Harris
- Both, Kamala Harris and her sister sang in a Baptist choir
- Harris’s parents divorced when she was 7
- Her mother was granted custody of the children by court-ordered settlement
- After the divorce, they moved to Montreal, Québec, Canada
- At Howard, Harris was elected to the liberal arts student council as freshman class representative
- She was a member of the debate team
- Kamala, also, joined the Alpha Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority
- She sought a career in law enforcement because she wanted to be “at the table where decisions are made.”
- In 2000, San Francisco’s elected City Attorney, Louise Renne, recruited Harris to join her office
- There Kamala Harris was chief of the Community and Neighborhood Division, which oversees civil code enforcement matters
- In 2008, Harris was seen as one of a number of women who could become president of the United States
- In 2009, Harris wrote Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer
- In her book she looked at criminal justice from an economic perspective and attempted to reduce temptation and access for criminals
- While Harris was the San Francisco District Attorney, the overall felony conviction rate rose from 52% in 2003 to 67% in 2006, the highest in a decade
- While these statistics represent only trial convictions, Harris also closed many cases via plea bargains
- When she took office, she took a special interest in clearing part of the murder caseload from the previous administration
- In 2012, Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo ruled that San Francisco District Attorney Harris’s office violated defendants’ rights by hiding damaging information about a police crime lab technician, and was indifferent to demands that it account for its failings
- As San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris created a special Hate Crimes Unit, focusing on hate crimes against LGBT children and teens in schools
- n 2004, The National Urban League honored Harris as a “Woman of Power”
- In 2005, she received the Thurgood Marshall Award from the National Black Prosecutors Association
- Kamala Harris participated in the National Mortgage Settlement against five banks: Ally Financial, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citibank, and Chase
- She introduced the California Homeowner’s Bill of Rights in the California State Legislature
- Kamala Harris has prosecuted numerous financial crimes, such as predatory lending
- On February 12, 2015, Harris announced that she would start a new agency called the Bureau of Children’s Justice
- In May, 2015, Harris toured the coastline, where the oil spilled happened and directed her office’s resources and attorneys to investigate possible criminal violations
- In 2012, she sent a letter to 100 mobile-app developers, asking them to comply with California law with respect to privacy issues
- During the second Obama administration,Kamala Harris was mentioned as a possible nominee for a seat on the United States Supreme Court if a seat on that court became vacant
- The New York Times identified her as a potential US Supreme Court nominee
- A day after President Trump was sworn into office, Harris called the message of Trump’s inaugural address “dark” when speaking during the Women’s March on Washington
- Kamala Harris came up with the name “Muslim ban”
- In an April 2018 hearing, Harris questioned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook’s misuse of users’ data
- In the September and October 2018 Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings,Kamala Harris participated in questioning the FBI Director’s limited scope of the investigation on Kavanaugh
- Harris was one of the targets of the October 2018 United States mail bombing attempts
- Kamala Harris has been considered a top contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination for President
- As of July 2018, she was spending more on Facebook advertising than any other senator
- Harris is married to California attorney Douglas Emhoff
- There marriage was on August 22, 2014, in Santa Barbara, California
- Harris’s sister is Maya Harris an MSNBC political analyst
- Her brother-in-law is Tony West, General Counsel of Uber and a former U.S. Justice Department senior official
- Kamala Harris has two stepchildren, one in college and one in high school
- In January 2019 Harris released a memoir, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey
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