Kamala Harris officially launches White House bid from California hometown

CALIFORNIA senator Kamala Harris officially launched her campaign for Democratic presidential nomination at a rally in Oakland, where she was born and spent her formative years.

Harris had announced her White House bid on 21 January.

Speaking at Oakland’s City Hall on Sunday (27), Harris said American democracy was under attack like never before.

"We are here because the American dream and our American democracy are under attack and on the line like never before," she said.

"When democratic values are under attack around the globe, when authoritarianism is on the march, when nuclear proliferation is on the rise, when we have foreign powers infecting the White House like malware, let's speak the truth," she added to applause from the audience.

Harris said she was raised to value public service and fight for justice. According to Harris, her mother would say, “’Don’t sit around and complain about things, do something’. Basically, I think she was saying, ‘You’ve got to get up and stand up and don’t give up the fight’.”

During the Oakland rally, Harris also took a jibe at president Donald Trump's border wall proposal, calling it "the president's medieval vanity project" and added that it won't stop transnational gangs.

Harris reiterated her stand against building a wall during a televised CNN town hall on Monday night (28), saying she won't vote to support funding for a border wall. Harris pointed out that she has visited the border and has seen the tunnels that cartels are building.

"That wall isn’t going to stop them," the Democrat said. "They're not jumping over a wall."

"I'm not going to vote for a wall under any circumstances," she said.

The 54-year-old, however, said she supported border security in the form of upgraded infrastructure and technology.

Indian Americans are “extremely excited” by Harris’ run for the White House. “We have done well extremely well professionally, educationally, created businesses and opportunities,” Ramesh Kapur, an entrepreneur and Democratic strategist who attended the Oakland rally, was quoted as saying by Hindustan Times, “but electing a president of your own DNA will the ultimate sign of that we have truly arrived.”