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Also Known As Kamala Devi Harris, Kamala Devi
Vice President of the United States
Kamala Devi Harris is a American politician and attorney who is the 49th and current vice president of the United States. She is the first female vice president and the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, as well as the first African-American and first Asian-American vice president. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served as the attorney general (AG) of California from 2011 to 2017 and as a U.S. senator representing California from 2017 to 2021.
Born in Oakland, California, Harris graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She began her career in the office of the district attorney (DA) of Alameda County, before being recruited to the San Francisco DA's Office and later the City Attorney of San Francisco's office. In 2003, she was elected DA of San Francisco. She was elected AG of California in 2010 and re-elected in 2014. Harris served as the junior U.S. senator from California from 2017 to 2021; she defeated Loretta Sanchez in the 2016 Senate election to become the second African-American woman and the first South Asian American to serve in the U.S. Senate. As a senator, she advocated for healthcare reform, federal de-scheduling of cannabis, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, the DREAM Act, a ban on assault weapons, and progressive tax reform. She gained a national profile for her pointed questioning of Trump administration officials during Senate hearings, including Trump's second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexual assault.
Harris sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, but withdrew from the race prior to the primaries. She was selected by Joe Biden to be his running mate, and their ticket went on to defeat the incumbent president and vice president, Donald Trump and Mike Pence, in the 2020 election. Harris and Biden were inaugurated on January 20, 2021.
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. Harris took a six-month leave of absence in 1994 from her duties, then afterward resumed as prosecutor during the years she sat on the boards. Harris's connection to Brown was noted in media reportage as part of a pattern of Californian political leaders appointing "friends and loyal political soldiers" to lucrative positions on the commissions. Harris has defended her work.
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 2000, Harris reportedly clashed with Hallinan's assistant, Darrell Salomon, over Proposition 21, which granted prosecutors the option of trying juvenile defendants in Superior Court rather than juvenile courts. Harris campaigned against the measure, which passed. Salomon opposed directing media inquiries about Prop 21 to Harris and reassigned her, a de facto demotion. Harris filed a complaint against Salomon and quit.
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.
In 2001, Harris briefly dated Montel Williams. Addressing the relationship, Williams tweeted in 2020, "Kamala Harris and I briefly dated about 20 years ago when we were both single. So what? I have great respect for Sen. Harris".
Harris assumed office as vice president of the United States on January 20, 2021. She is the United States' first female vice president, the highest-ranking female elected official in U.S. history, and the first African-American and first Asian-American vice president. She is also the second person of color to hold the post, preceded by Charles Curtis, a Native American and member of the Kaw Nation, who served under Herbert Hoover from 1929 to 1933. She is the third person with acknowledged non-European ancestry to reach one of the highest offices in the executive branch, after Curtis and former president Barack Obama.
Harris resigned her Senate seat on January 18, 2021, two days before her swearing-in as vice president. Her first act as vice president was swearing in her replacement Alex Padilla and Georgia senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, who were elected in the 2021 Georgia runoff elections.
Upon taking office on January 20, 2021, the 117th Congress's Senate was divided 50–50 between Republicans and Democrats;this meant that Harris had to be frequently called upon to exercise her power to cast tie-breaking votes as president of the Senate. Harris cast her first two tie-breaking votes on February 5, 2021. In February and March, Harris's tie-breaking votes were crucial in passing the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 stimulus package proposed by President Biden since no Republicans in the Senate voted for the package. On July 20, 2021, Harris broke Mike Pence's record for tie-breaking votes in the first year of a vice presidency[323] when she cast the seventh tie-breaking vote in her first six months and cast 13 tie-breaking votes during her first year in office, the most tie-breaking votes in a single year in U.S. history, surpassing John Adams who cast 12 votes in 1790. As of June 2023, Harris has cast the second-most tie-breaking votes by a vice president with 30, trailing only John C. Calhoun who cast 31 votes as vice president.
In a debunked story by the New York Post in April 2021, it was claimed that Harris's children's book Superheroes Are Everywhere was being distributed en masse through "welcome kits" given to migrant children at a shelter in Long Beach, California. In reality, only a single copy of the book had been donated by a member of the public. The writer of the original story, Laura Italiano, claimed that she was forced to write the story against her will and she resigned from the New York Post as a result.
In April 2021, Harris indicated that she was the last person in the room before President Biden decided to remove all U.S. troops from Afghanistan and commented that the president has "an extraordinary amount of courage" and "make(s) decisions based on what he truly believes ... is the right thing to do."[329] National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that Biden "insists she be in every core decision-making meeting. She weighs in during those meetings, often providing unique perspectives."
Harris and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, July 2021
On March 24, 2021, Biden tasked Harris with reducing the number of unaccompanied minors and adult asylum seekers. She is also tasked with leading the negotiations with Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Harris conducted her first international trip as vice president in June 2021, visiting Guatemala and Mexico in an attempt to address the root causes of an increase in migration from Central America to the United States. During her visit, in a joint press conference with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, Harris issued an appeal to potential migrants, stating "I want to be clear to folks in the region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come." Her work in Central America led to creation of task forces on corruption and human trafficking; a women's empowerment program, and an investment fund for housing and businesses.
Harris met with French President Emmanuel Macron in November 2021 to strengthen ties after the cancellation of a submarine program.
During her time in office, Harris has had one of the lowest approval ratings of any VPs in recorded history
On November 19, 2021, Harris served as acting president from 10:10 to 11:35 am EST, while President Biden underwent a colonoscopy.[338] She became the first woman, and the third person overall, to assume the powers and duties of the U.S. presidency under Section 3 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment.
Harris's term in office has seen high staff turnovers that included the departures of her chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, press secretary, deputy press secretary, communications director, and chief speechwriter. An anonymous source said that they resigned because they and other staffers "often feel mistreated" by senior staffers. "Symone Sanders, senior advisor and chief spokesperson for Harris, pushed back against the complaints" and defended their management style, especially for giving opportunities to black women. Sanders herself resigned from her position in December 2021
Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California, on October 20, 1964. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a Tamil Indian biologist, whose work on the progesterone receptor gene stimulated advances in breast cancer research. She came to the United States from India in 1958, as a 19-year-old graduate student in nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley, and received her PhD in 1964. Kamala Harris's Jamaican American father, Donald J. Harris, is of African and Irish ancestry. He is a Stanford University professor of economics (emeritus) who arrived in the United States from British Jamaica in 1961, for graduate study at UC Berkeley, receiving a PhD in economics in 1966.Donald Harris met his future wife Shyamala Gopalan at a college club for African-American students (though Indian, Gopalan was allowed to join).
Harris's childhood home on Bancroft Way in Berkeley
In 1966, the Harris family moved to Champaign, Illinois (where Kamala's younger sister Maya was born) when her parents took positions at the University of Illinois. The family moved around the Midwest, with both parents working at multiple universities in succession over a brief period. Kamala Harris, along with her mother and sister, moved back to California in 1970, while her father remained in the Midwest. They stayed briefly on Milvia Street in central Berkeley, then at a duplex on Bancroft Way in West Berkeley, an area often called the "flatlands" with a significant black population. When Harris began kindergarten, she was bused as part of Berkeley's comprehensive desegregation program to Thousand Oaks Elementary School, a public school in a more prosperous neighborhood in northern Berkeley which previously had been 95 percent white, and after the desegregation plan went into effect became 40 percent black.
A neighbor regularly took the Harris girls to an African American church in Oakland where they sang in the children's choir, and the girls and their mother also frequently visited a nearby African American cultural center. Their mother introduced them to Hinduism and took them to a nearby Hindu temple, where she occasionally sang. As children, she and her sister visited their mother's family in Madras (now Chennai) several times. She says she has been strongly influenced by her maternal grandfather P. V. Gopalan, a retired Indian civil servant whose progressive views on democracy and women's rights impressed her. Harris has remained in touch with her Indian aunts and uncles throughout her adult life. Harris has also visited her father's family in Jamaica.
Her parents divorced when she was seven. Harris has said that when she and her sister visited their father in Palo Alto on weekends, other children in the neighborhood were not allowed to play with them because they were black. When she was twelve, Harris and her sister moved with their mother to Montreal, Quebec, where Shyamala had accepted a research and teaching position at the McGill University-affiliated Jewish General Hospital. Harris attended a French-speaking primary school, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, then F.A.C.E. School, and finally Westmount High School in Westmount, Quebec, graduating in 1981. Wanda Kagan, a high school friend of Harris, later told CBC News in 2020 that Harris was her best friend and described how she confided in Harris that Kagan had been molested by her stepfather. She said that Harris told her mother, who then insisted Kagan come to live with them for the remainder of her final year of high school. Kagan said Harris had recently told her that their friendship, and playing a role in countering Kagan's exploitation, helped form the commitment Harris felt in protecting women and children as a prosecutor. After high school, in 1982, Harris attended Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C. While at Howard, she interned as a mailroom clerk for California senator Alan Cranston, chaired the economics society, led the debate team, and joined Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. Harris graduated from Howard in 1986 with a degree in political science and economics.
Harris then returned to California to attend law school at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law through its Legal Education Opportunity Program (LEOP). While at UC Hastings, she served as president of its chapter of the Black Law Students Association. She graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1989 and was admitted to the California Bar in June 1990.
Harris met her husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, through a mutual friend who set up Harris and Emhoff on a blind date in 2013. Emhoff was an entertainment lawyer who became partner-in-charge at Venable LLP's Los Angeles office. Harris and Emhoff were married on August 22, 2014, in Santa Barbara, California.[360] Harris is a stepmother to Emhoff's two children, Cole and Ella, from his previous marriage to the film producer Kerstin Emhoff. As of August 2019, Harris and her husband had an estimated net worth of $5.8 million.
Harris is a multiracial American and a Baptist, holding membership of the Third Baptist Church of San Francisco, a congregation of the American Baptist Churches USA. She is a member of The Links.
Harris's sister, Maya, is a lawyer and MSNBC political analyst; her brother-in-law, Tony West, is general counsel of Uber and a former United States Department of Justice senior official. Her niece, Meena, is the founder of the Phenomenal Women Action Campaign and former head of strategy and leadership at Uber.
In 2005, the National Black Prosecutors Association awarded Harris the Thurgood Marshall Award. That year, she was included in a Newsweek report profiling "20 of America's Most Powerful Women". A 2008 New York Times article also identified her as a woman with potential to become president of the United States, highlighting her reputation as a "tough fighter".
In 2013, 2020, and 2021, Time included Harris on the Time 100, Time's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2016, the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center awarded Harris the Bipartisan Justice Award along with Senator Tim Scott. Biden and Harris were jointly named Time Person of the Year for 2020.
Harris was selected for the inaugural 2021 Forbes 50 Over 50; made up of entrepreneurs, leaders, scientists and creators who are over the age of 50.
