Sen. Kamala Harris announces she will run for president in 2020 originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

California Sen. Kamala Harris announced Monday that she will run for president in 2020, joining an increasingly crowded field of Democrats seeking to challenge President Donald Trump.

Harris' announcement, made on "Good Morning America," comes following months of speculation surrounding the Democrat, a rising star in the party who was elected California's junior senator in 2016 after two terms as the state's attorney general.

"I love my country. I love my country," she said. "This is a moment in time that I feel a sense of responsibility to stand up and fight for the best of who we are."

The bid for the presidency puts Harris in a position -- should she emerge from the Democratic field and defeat Trump -- to become the first woman and woman of color to ascend to the nation's highest office.

PHOTO: Kamala Harris appears on 'Good Morning America,' Jan. 21, 2019. (ABC News) More

Less than two weeks ago, Harris, 54, said she was not yet ready to make an announcement about a possible campaign. In the interim, at least three serious contenders declared their candidacies or interest in running, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., earlier announced that she was forming a presidential exploratory committee.

As part of her announcement, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Harris cited the civil rights leader as an inspiration, saying that she seeks to continue his fight to make the country better.

(MORE: How Kamala Harris Could Win The 2020 Democratic Primary)

"The thing about Dr. King that always inspires me is that he was aspirational. He was aspirational like our country is aspirational. We know that we've not yet reached those ideals. But our strength is that we fight to reach those ideals," the senator said. "So today, the day we celebrate Dr. King, is a very special day for all of us as Americans and I'm honored to be able to make my announcement on the day we commemorate him."

PHOTO: Senator Kamala Harris appears on 'Good Morning America,' Jan. 21, 2019. (Lorenzo Bevilaqua/ABC) More

In interviews earlier this month coinciding with the release of her memoir, Harris explained that she was empowered at a young age with the disposition to take personal responsibility to address the hardships she encountered, an attribute that appears to be part of her pitch to voters.

"I was raised that, when you see a problem, you don't complain about it, you go and do something about it," she said on "Good Morning America" on Jan. 8.

(MORE: Sen. Kamala Harris hits Trump's border wall 'vanity project')

On Monday, Harris further explained that she believed the American people were looking for a commander in chief with "leadership skills, experience and integrity," who will "fight on their behalf."

"On all of those points, I feel very confident about my ability to lead," she said. "I feel very confident about my ability to listen and to work on behalf of the American public. The American public wants a fighter, and they want someone that is going to fight like heck for them and not fight based on self-interests. I'm prepared to do that."

Though Harris is widely portrayed as a progressive member of the Senate and has staked out positions on a number of issues aligning herself with the liberal wing of the Democratic party, she has recently faced some criticism over her tenure as California's attorney general -- a portion of her career during which Harris has said she was a "progressive prosecutor."

"Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent," wrote Lara Bazelon, a University of San Francisco law professor, in a New York Times op-ed last week. "Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors."

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