"Canadian law required five years of permanent residence, and she moved to Canada in December 1967 — only three years before Sen. Cruz’s birth," a Cruz strategist said. | Getty Cruz, trolled by Trump, releases his mother's birth certificate

In another attempt to quash Trump-fueled speculation that he is not eligible for the presidency based on his Canadian birth, Ted Cruz's campaign released his mother's birth certificate to Breitbart News on Friday, showing that Eleanor Darragh was born Nov. 23, 1934, in Wilmington, Delaware.

In separate statements to Breitbart, a Cruz strategist said that the candidate's mother had never been a citizen of Canada. The fact is a point of contention because while most legal scholars agree that Cruz is eligible for the presidency because his mother was born in the United States, thus making him a "natural born citizen," the question of whether his mother had ever been a Canadian citizen lingered.


“She was in Canada on a work permit and never became a permanent resident, let alone a citizen,” the Cruz strategist, Jason Johnson, said. “She never registered to vote and never applied for Canadian citizenship.”

In a follow-up statement, Johnson affirmed that she had not lived long enough in the country to become a citizen under Canadian law by the time Cruz was born in December 1970.

"Canadian law required five years of permanent residence, and she moved to Canada in December 1967 — only three years before Sen. Cruz’s birth," Johnson told the outlet.

On Cruz's own birth certificate from 1970, which he released in 2013, his mother's full name is listed as "Eleanor Elizabeth Wilson," bearing the last name of a previous marriage. Cruz renounced his dual Canadian citizenship in 2014.

Carly Fiorina added to the fracas on Thursday when she questioned why it took Cruz until 2014 to do so. "Well, I don't know all the particulars, but I would say this: I find it odd that Sen. Ted Cruz did not renounce his dual Canadian citizenship until 2014 when it became clear he was running for president," she told Fox News on the program "On the Record."

With an interview in The Washington Post published earlier in the week, fellow presidential candidate Donald Trump resurrected the narrative around whether Cruz's birth in Calgary, Canada, would disqualify him from office.

Trump has repeated in other interviews that Cruz is eligible, but publicly urged the Texas senator that he might want to get a declaratory judgment to that effect. ("I'm not going to be taking legal advice anytime soon from Donald Trump," Cruz, a Harvard Law graduate and former Supreme Court clerk, responded.)

The Cruz citizenship flap harkens to 2011, when Trump credited himself with getting President Barack Obama to produce his long-form birth certificate to prove he was born in the U.S. (Trump has suggested more recently that he still harbors doubts.)

A year later, Cruz's father Rafael, who was born in Cuba, waded into the discourse over where Obama was born by remarking that the president should "go back to Kenya."

Cruz explained in July 2015 that his father, who was giving a speech to a Texas tea party group in September 2012, was merely repeating what a member of the audience had said.

“Well, what actually happened if you go to the video, my father was giving a talk and what he actually said was President Obama should go back to Chicago and someone in the audience calls out ‘back to Kenya’ and my father laughed and repeated ‘back to Kenya’ and kept going and, in the context to anyone watching, it was obvious that it wasn’t him — and immediately the Internet turns this into ‘Pastor Cruz says Obama’s from Kenya,’” Cruz said on Fox News Radio, according to BuzzFeed's account of his explanation.

Even if Obama were born in Kenya, however, he would be eligible for the presidency under the same legal logic as Cruz: He would have been born to an American mother abroad, and therefore a "natural born citizen" of the United States from Day One.