Have you now or ever been a U.S. citizen? By birth, Ted Cruz says
In a way, Ted Cruz says, his bona fide citizenship traces to the birth of the United States.
The Texas senator was born in the western Canada city of Calgary, Alberta, in 1970 to a Cuban father and American mother. His mother’s citizenship automatically made her son a U.S. citizen and, most legal authorities concur, eligible to run for president. (In May 2014, too, Cruz renounced his dual Canadian citizenship.)
Yet last month, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush suggested Cruz had benefited from the 14th Amendment’s birthright grant of citizenship to anyone born in the United States, Politico said in a news story. Cruz later told reporters Bush seemed confused about legal versus illegal immigration.
And, Cruz said, “with regard to legal citizens, I am a United States citizen because my mother was a United States citizen, born in Wilmington, Delaware. And it has been the law since the beginning of the country that the children of American citizens born here or abroad are American citizens by birth.”
He was hearkening to a 1790 act with just that element though, we learned, citizenship through a mother wasn’t specified in law until… 1934–rating this claim MOSTLY TRUE.
Read our full fact check here.
