CLAIM: Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley is ineligible to be president because her parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of her birth.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. Haley is a natural-born U.S. citizen who is eligible to serve as president. The former ambassador to the United Nations was born on Jan. 20, 1972, in Bamberg, South Carolina, according to information on her official website when she was governor of the state.

THE FACTS: With the Iowa caucuses just two weeks away, some on social media are erroneously claiming that Haley, who served as governor of South Carolina from 2011 to 2017, cannot legally hold the country’s highest office.

“Nikki Haley is Constitutionally ineligible to be President….or Vice President,” reads one post on X, formerly Twitter, that had received approximately 6,900 likes and shares as of Tuesday. The post links to an article that argues Haley is ineligible because her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born.

In her 2012 autobiography, Haley wrote that her parents “were born in the Punjab region of India.” Haley’s office told South Carolina newspaper The State in 2015, when she was governor, that her father, Ajit Randhawa, became a U.S. citizen in 1978 — six years after Haley’s birth — while her mother, Raj Randhawa, was naturalized in 2003.

But experts agree Haley is a legitimate candidate as defined by the Constitution, regardless of her parents’ citizenship status. Her birth in Bamberg makes her a natural-born citizen,...

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