Ted CruzWikipedia
Rafael Edward "Ted" Cruz (born December 22, 1970) is an American politician who is the junior U.S. Senator from Texas.
Early life and ancestryWikipediaTed Cruz was born on December 22, 1970,[3][4] in Calgary, Alberta, Canada,
to parents Eleanor Elizabeth (Darragh) Wilson and
Rafael Bienvenido Cruz.[5][6][7] At the time of his birth, Cruz' parents were working in the oil business as owners of a seismic-data processing firm for oil drilling.[6][8][9][10][11] Cruz has said, “I’m the son of two mathematicians/computer programmers.â€[12]
Rafael Cruz was born in Cuba, and his father was from the Canary Islands in Spain.
Ted Cruz's mother was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and is of three quarters Irish and one quarter Italian ancestry.[13][14] His
father left Cuba in 1957 to attend the University of Texas at Austin, obtained political asylum in the United States after his four-year student visa expired, and became a Canadian citizen during his eight-year stay in that country.[15]
Rafael Cruz ultimately became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2005.[6][16][17][18] His mother earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rice University in the 1950s.[19] Eleanor and Rafael Cruz divorced in 1997.[20]
Cruz had two older half-sisters from his father's previous marriage, Miriam Ceferina Cruz and Roxana Lourdes Cruz. Miriam, who had several brushes with the law during the 1990s and 2000s including charges of theft and public intoxication, died of a prescription drug overdose on January 10, 2011.[20] Roxana, who has declined media interviews, is a physician in Texas.[20][21][22] Cruz also had a half-brother, Michael Wilson (1960–1965), from his mother's previous marriage. He first learned of him from his mother during his teenage years.[22]
Rafael Cruz moved his family to Texas in 1974.[23] When he was a child, Ted Cruz's mother told him that she would have to make an affirmative act to claim Canadian citizenship for him, so his family assumed that he did not hold Canadian citizenship.[24] In August 2013, after the Dallas Morning News pointed out that Cruz had dual Canadian-American citizenship,[25] he applied to formally renounce his Canadian citizenship and ceased being a citizen of Canada on May 14, 2014.[24][26]