Rafael Edward Cruz (; born December 22, 1970) is an American politician and attorney serving as the junior United States senator from Texas since 2013. A member of the Republican Party, Cruz served as Solicitor General of Texas from 2003 to 2008. After graduating from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Cruz pursued a career in politics. He worked as a policy advisor in the George W. Bush administration before serving as Solicitor General of Texas from 2003 to 2008. 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, Cruz 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. He was reelected in a close Senate race in 2018 against Democratic candidate Beto O'Rourke. In 2016, Cruz ran for president of the United States, placing second behind Donald Trump in the Republican primaries. The competition for the Republican presidential nomination between Trump and Cruz was deeply acrimonious and characterized by a series of public personal attacks. While Cruz initially declined to endorse Trump's campaign once he won the nomination, he became a staunch Trump supporter 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. Early life and family Rafael Edward Cruz was born on December 22, 1970, at Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to Eleanor Elizabeth () Wilson and Rafael Cruz. Cruz's mother was born in Wilmington, Delaware. 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. He earned Canadian citizenship in 1973 and became a naturalized United States citizen