(UnitedHeadlines.com) – In a post on Truth Social, former President Donald Trump promoted a “birther” theory about 2024 Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley.
In the post, Trump said that because her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born, she is ineligible to be president. Haley’s parents immigrated to the U.S. from India. Although Haley was born in 1972 in South Carolina, her parents did not become U.S. citizens until after she was born. From 2011 to 2017, Haley served as the governor of South Carolina. She was the ambassador to the United Nations while Trump was president.
According to the 14th Amendment, “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” are considered citizens. In order to be eligible to be president, a person must be older than 35 years old, a “natural born citizen” and have lived in the country for at least 14 years.
Harvard Law School professor emeritus Laurence Tribe wrote that the “purpose of the 14th Amendment” was that if you were born in the U.S., you were a citizen. He added that “as a legal and constitutional matter,” the birther claims made by Trump against Haley are “baseless.”
This is not the first time Trump has spread the birther claim, a term coined as a way to describe the theories about former President Barack Obama. In 2011, Trump claimed Obama was ineligible to be president because he was not born in Hawaii but instead born in Kenya. Trump also stated that Obama’s birth certificate was fake. In 2016, Trump also stated that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada, was ineligible to run even though his mother was a U.S. citizen. In 2020, he said that Vice President Kamala, who was born in the U.S., was ineligible to run because her parents were not citizens when she was born.
Trump has previously stated that “birthright citizenship” should not apply to the children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States.
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