- Monday, February 24, 2025
Haley, a former diplomat in Trump’s presidency, was born in South Carolina to immigrant parents from India’s Punjab.
By: Shubham Ghosh
INDIAN-BORN US lawmaker Raja Krishnamoorthi has lashed out at former US president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump over his alleged ‘birther’ claims against Nikki Haley, who is challenging him in the race for the GOP nomination for this November’s election.
Last week, Trump took to his social media platform Truth Social to repost a claim about Haley that she is not eligible to become the president of the US since her parents were not citizens of the country at the time of her birth.
Haley, who will turn 52 on Saturday (20), was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa in South Carolina to immigrant Sikh parents from Amritsar in India’s Punjab. They had moved to Canada from India and then shifted to the US where his father worked as a professor. Haley automatically became a US citizen as she was born in the country.
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Trump posted a screenshot of the claim being made about his GOP colleague by the far-right website The Gateway Pundit.
“It’s sadly no surprise that Donald Trump is back at it with more false and racist ‘birther’ claims,” Indian American Congressman Krishnamoorthi, who is a Democrat and represents the state of Illinois in the House of Representatives, said in a statement on Thursday (18).
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“As a proud Indian American immigrant, the hateful attacks the former president is launching against Nikki Haley are all too familiar to me. Any Republican who claims to support the South Asian community should condemn this rhetoric,” Krishnamoorthi said.
Trump attacked Haley, who he soundly defeated in the Iowa caucuses held earlier this week and will take on in the New Hampshire primary next week as the only opponent. He compared her to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton who he defeated in the 2016 election for her name changes and even posted a picture of Haley’s face superimposed on Clinton’s body.
Trump also misspelled Haley’s Indian name in another Truth Social post, saying, “Anyone listening to Nikki ‘Nimrada’ Haley’s wacked out speech last night, would think that she won the Iowa Primary. She didn’t, and she couldn’t even beat a very flawed Ron DeSanctimonious, who’s out of money, and out of hope.”
As per the US Constitution, the qualifications to run for presidency are: They must be at least 35 years old, be a “natural-born” citizen and have been a resident of the United States for 14 years. Section Three of the 14th amendment, approved after the Civil War, added that anyone who engaged in or aided an “insurrection” against the United States after taking an oath to support the Constitution was ineligible to “hold any office, civil or military,” The New York Times reported.
Trump had previously raised the question of the birth of former US president Barack Obama, with whom Krishnamoorthi worked closely in the past, and the current vice president Kamala Harris.
He has also called for an end to birthright citizenship.
(With agency inputs)
