Kamala Harris’ life, career, and first experiences from Attorney General to Vice President

The historic move comes as calls for Biden to resign grew within the Democratic Party following his faltering performance in the first presidential debate with former President Donald Trump last month.

Harris is the first woman, the first Black person and the first Asian American to serve as vice president, and with Biden’s endorsement, she could become the first woman to serve as president.

Here’s what you need to know about Harris, including the history of her barrier-breaking firsts.

Harris was born in Oakland, California in 1964 to Indian-born cancer researcher Shyamala Gopalan and Jamaican-born economist Donald Harris, who met while studying at the University of California, Berkeley, after immigrating to the US. Harris has one sister, Maya.

Her parents were activists who would take Harris to civil rights demonstrations even when she was in a stroller, according to her White House biography. Harris’ parents divorced when she was seven, and she credits her mother, who was her primary caregiver, with immersing her and her sister in Indian and African-American cultures during their growing up years.

“My mother was well aware that she was raising two Black daughters,” Harris wrote in her 2019 memoir, “and she was determined that we would grow up to be confident, proud Black women.”

Harris immigrated to Canada with her mother and sister when she was 12 years old, and after graduating from high school in Quebec, she returned to the United States and studied at Howard University, a historically black institution in Washington, DC.

Having attended predominantly white schools since elementary school, Harris said she was prepared for a different experience in college.

The “beauty” of Howard, Harris wrote in her memoir, was that “every signal sent to its students that we were young, talented, and black and that nothing should stand in the way of our success.”

She majored in political science and economics, and spent multiple weekends protesting South African apartheid on the National Mall, and in 1983 led a sit-in at the university administration building to protest the ouster of the editor of the student newspaper.

After graduating from Howard University, he earned his law degree from the University of California, Hastings in 1989. He was admitted to the California Bar in 1990 and joined the Alameda County Prosecutor’s Office in Oakland as an Assistant District Attorney specializing in the prosecution of child sexual assault cases.

Harris has said she became a prosecutor because she wanted to change a criminal justice system from the inside that disproportionately affects minorities. She then served in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, where she prosecuted serial felons as managing attorney for the office’s Criminal Division. She then led the San Francisco City Attorney’s Family and Children’s Division.

Harris ran for San Francisco district attorney in 2003 against the incumbent district attorney for whom she had worked. During the campaign, her opponents questioned the validity of Harris’ previous service on two state boards, which she had held after being appointed to those positions by former California Assembly Speaker and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, with whom she had previously been romantically involved. Candidates in the race also questioned whether Harris could fairly investigate Mayor Brown’s administration.

She won election in 2003, becoming the first African-American woman and South Asian-American woman to hold the position in California. Seven years later, after a second term as district attorney, she was elected California’s attorney general, receiving similarly high ratings.

Harris’ tenure as district attorney gave her an edge in her run for state attorney general and then for U.S. Senate, but some of her record has been controversial. During the 2020 presidential election, her decision as attorney general to threaten criminal charges against parents of truant students was criticized because some jurisdictions sent parents to prison while enforcing that policy. Harris called those incarcerations “unintended consequences” and said she never sent a parent to prison under the policy.

Harris’ record as a prosecutor has led to some more liberal policies, including her challenge to California’s three-strikes law, which allows for sentences of 25 years to life in prison for a third felony conviction. When she was San Francisco’s chief prosecutor, Harris only imposed this sentence if the third crime was serious or violent. Six years after Harris began speaking out against the law, voters overturned it.

In 2010, Harris defied expectations to win the California attorney general election, narrowly defeating Steve Cooley, a popular Republican from Los Angeles County.

As Attorney General, Harris’ record on criminal justice was also mixed. For example, she maintained local authority over police body camera use and police shooting investigations. Harris supported the use of body cameras but did not implement statewide standards for their use and also opposed a bill that would have required the Attorney General’s Office to investigate police shootings.

But as district attorney, Harris opposed the death penalty — she refused to prosecute capital cases in San Francisco, even in a high-profile case involving the killing of a police officer, a ruling that angered the local police union — but as attorney general, she also appealed California court decisions that found the death penalty unconstitutional.

In 2014, while she was California’s attorney general, Ms Harris married Los Angeles lawyer Doug Emhoff in a small ceremony officiated by her sister Maya. Emhoff’s two children from a previous marriage, Ella and Cole, gave Ms Harris the nickname “Momala.”

In 2016, Harris ran for the United States Senate with the support of then-President Obama and Vice President Biden. In California’s general election vote, Harris handily defeated another Senate candidate, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.).

Her victory made her just the second Black woman elected to the Senate, a bright spot for Democrats as Trump clinched the presidency.

During her time as a senator, Harris distinguished herself by using her prosecutorial skills in committee hearings to grill President Trump’s nominees and appointees.

Ms. Harris, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, pressed then-Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh on whether he was aware of any laws that dictate what men should do with their bodies in the same way that abortion laws dictate what women should do, to which Kavanaugh responded with a flustered “I don’t know.” Ms. Harris also pressed him on whether he had discussed the Mueller investigation with anyone from a law firm with ties to Mr. Trump.

Then in May 2019, Attorney General William P. Barr appeared before the Judiciary Committee and asked Harris whether President Trump, or anyone else in the White House, had ever suggested that an investigation be opened of anyone.

Barr hesitated, then asked her to repeat the question, and as he searched for an answer, Harris said, “It sounds like you remember that sort of thing.”

Barr ultimately said he couldn’t answer the questions, and Democrats hailed the exchange as revealing ethics concerns and inappropriate closeness between Barr and the White House.

In 2019, two years after taking office as a senator, Harris announced her candidacy for president, and her breakout moment came when she went after Biden during the first Democratic presidential debate.

Ms Harris, the only Black candidate on stage, criticised Mr Biden for comments he made at a recent fundraiser in which he suggested he was good at bringing people together, citing his ties to segregationists in the Senate in the 1970s as evidence.

During the debate, Harris said Biden’s comments were “hard to hear.”

She also personally criticized Biden for his opposition to busing in the 1970s, noting that her California school was in the second class to be racially integrated through a policy that forced black students to attend predominantly white schools.

Harris was seen as a rising female star in the Democratic Party, but struggled to consistently gain support in the polls during her presidential campaign. She withdrew from the race in December 2019, two months before the first primary vote was cast. In a letter to supporters, she blamed her campaign’s financial difficulties for her decision to withdraw.

In the summer of 2020, Biden announced he had picked her as his running mate, fulfilling his campaign pledge to field a woman.

“This morning, little girls across this country are waking up, especially black and brown girls who too often feel overlooked and undervalued in our society,” Biden said, “But today, they’re seeing themselves with new eyes, maybe for the first time.”

When Biden declared victory in November 2020, Harris became the first vice president-elect in recent years to deliver a victory speech alongside the president-elect. Dressed all in white as a tribute to the women’s suffragists who secured women the right to vote just a century ago, Harris acknowledged that she was accomplishing something no one else like her had done before.

“Tonight, I remember their struggle, their determination and the strength of their vision – freed from the burdens of the past to see what is possible – and I stand on their shoulders,” she said. “And what an incredible testament to his character is the boldness with which Joe broke down one of the greatest barriers that exist in our country and chose a woman as his vice president.”

Early in his term, Vice President Biden tasked Harris with addressing a politically tricky issue for his administration: the root causes of immigration. Harris also worked on voting rights, an issue that continues to divide Washington along partisan lines and where no major legislation has passed despite multiple attempts. Since her first year as vice president, Harris’ office has seen several high-profile departures and staff turnover raise questions about her management style.

The 2022 Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, a fundamental right to abortion established in 1973, marked a turning point for Harris, who has been the administration’s voice on maternal health and has since expanded to reproductive rights. She has been more vocal than Biden about restricting access to abortion. And this year, she made history by visiting a medical center that offers abortions, the first time a U.S. president or vice president has toured such a facility while in office.

In a statement endorsing Harris as the Democratic nominee to succeed him in 2024, Biden wrote, “My first decision as the nominee of my party in 2020 was to select Kamala Harris as my vice president, and it was the best decision I ever made.”

In a statement on Sunday, Harris said she was “honored to receive the president’s endorsement” and “intends to seek and win the Democratic nomination for president.”

“Over the past year, I’ve traveled the country speaking to the American people about a clear choice in this crucial election, and in the days and weeks ahead, I will continue to do so,” she said. “I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party — and unite the country — to defeat Donald Trump. We are 107 days away from Election Day, and we will fight together, and we will win together.”

Chelsea Janes and Valerie Strauss contributed to this report.