Ted Cruz

She is of three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Italian descent, and earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rice University in the 1950s.

Cruz's father, Rafael, was born and raised in Cuba, the son of a Canary Islander who immigrated to Cuba as a child.

As a teenager in the 1950s, Rafael Cruz was beaten by agents of Fulgencio Batista for opposing the Batista regime.

He left Cuba in 1957 to attend the University of Texas at Austin and obtained political asylum in the United States after his four-year student visa expired.

Rafael Edward Cruz (born December 22, 1970) is an American politician, attorney, and political commentator serving as the junior United States senator from Texas since 2013.

Rafael Edward Cruz was born on December 22, 1970, at Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to Eleanor Elizabeth (Darragh) Wilson and Rafael Cruz.

Cruz's mother was born in Wilmington, Delaware.

He earned Canadian citizenship in 1973 and became a naturalized United States citizen in 2005.

At the time of his birth, Ted Cruz's parents had lived in Calgary for three years and were working in the oil business as owners of a seismic-data processing firm for oil drilling.

Cruz has said that he is the son of "two mathematicians/computer programmers".

In 1974, Cruz's father left the family and moved to Texas.

Later that year, Cruz's parents reconciled and relocated the family to Houston.

Cruz attended two private high schools: Faith West Academy, near Katy, Texas; and Second Baptist High School in Houston, from which he graduated as valedictorian in 1988.

During high school, Cruz participated in a Houston-based group known at the time as the Free Market Education Foundation, a program that taught high school students the philosophies of economists such as Milton Friedman and Frédéric Bastiat.

After high school, Cruz studied public policy at Princeton University.

While at Princeton, he competed for the American Whig-Cliosophic Society's Debate Panel and won the top speaker award at both the 1992 U.S. National Debating Championship and the 1992 North American Debating Championship.

In 1992, he was named U.S. National Speaker of the Year and, with his debate partner David Panton, Team of the Year by the American Parliamentary Debate Association.

Cruz graduated from Princeton in 1992 with a Bachelor of Arts cum laude.

Cruz and Panton later represented Harvard Law School at the 1995 World Debating Championship, losing in the semifinals to a team from Australia.

Princeton's debate team named their annual novice championship after Cruz.

At Princeton, Cruz was a member of Colonial Club.

They divorced in 1997.

Cruz has two older half-sisters, Miriam Ceferina Cruz and Roxana Lourdes Cruz, from his father's first marriage.

A member of the Republican Party, Cruz was the solicitor general of Texas from 2003 to 2008.

After graduating from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Cruz pursued a career in politics, later working as a policy advisor in the George W. Bush administration.

In 2003, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott appointed Cruz to serve as Solicitor General, a position he held through 2008.

Miriam died in 2011 from a drug overdose.

Cruz began going by Ted at age 13.

For junior high school, Cruz went to Awty International School in Houston.

His 115-page senior thesis at Princeton investigated the separation of powers; its title, Clipping the Wings of Angels: The History and Theory Behind the Ninth and Tenth Amendments of the United States Constitution, was inspired by a passage attributed to James Madison from the 51st essay of the Federalist Papers: "If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."

Cruz argued that the drafters of the Constitution intended to protect their constituents' rights, and that the last two items in the Bill of Rights offer an explicit stop against an all-powerful state.

In 2012, Cruz was elected to the U.S. Senate, becoming the first Hispanic-American to serve as a U.S. senator from Texas.

In the Senate, he has taken consistently conservative positions on economic and social policy; he played a leading role in the 2013 United States federal government shutdown, seeking to force Congress and President Barack Obama to defund the Affordable Care Act.

On March 23, 2015, Cruz announced he was running for president.

Despite having only been a senator for two years, he emerged as a serious contender in the Republican primaries.

The competition for the Republican presidential nomination between Cruz and front-runner Donald Trump was heated and characterized by a series of public personal attacks.

After Trump won the nomination, Cruz initially declined to endorse him, but he became a staunch supporter of Trump during his presidency.

After the January 2021 Capitol attack, Cruz received widespread political and popular backlash for objecting to the certification of Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election and giving credence to the false claim that the election was fraudulent.

Cruz is running for reelection to the Senate in 2024 against Democratic nominee Colin Allred and other third-party candidates.

He was reelected in a close Senate race in 2018 against Democratic candidate Beto O'Rourke.