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Threads posts
Threads posts
stated on July 31, 2024 in a post:

Vice President Kamala Harris “was born in Canada.”

Pants on Fire!
By Sara Swann
August 1, 2024

Kamala Harris was born in the U.S., not Canada

If your time is short

  • Vice President Kamala Harris was born in 1964 in Oakland, California.

  • Harris lived in Canada from ages 12 to 18. She moved back to the United States after finishing high school.

See the sources for this fact-check

Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has been subject to repeated attacks that she’s not eligible to run for president because of her racial identity and background.

A July 31 Threads post claimed Harris was not American because she “was born in Canada.”

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

Harris born in Canada claim graphic
Figure 1: Harris born in Canada claim graphic

(Screengrab from Threads)

Harris was born Oct. 20, 1964, in Oakland, California. She grew up in a Black middle-class neighborhood in Berkeley, California.

Her parents separated when she was 5 years old. When Harris was about 12, she moved with her mother and sister to Montreal after her mother, a scientist, took a research position at the Jewish General Hospital and a teaching role at McGill University, according to Vox, CTV News and the Los Angeles Times.

Harris moved back to the United States after graduating in 1981 from Westmount High School in Quebec, the Toronto Star reported.

Harris graduated from Howard University, an historically Black university, in Washington, D.C., in 1986 and earned her law degree at the University of California, Hastings in 1989.

Constitutional scholars have told PolitiFact that because Harris was born in the U.S., she is qualified to run for president.

We rate the claim that Harris was “born in Canada” Pants on Fire!

RELATED: Kamala Harris is again facing attacks on her racial identity. Here’s more about her background.

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