Kamala Harris kicks off 2020 presidential campaign

Washington: Indian American Senator Kamala Harris has officially kicked off her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination at a rally where she warned that the US and the world were at "an inflection point" in history and called on all Americans to "speak the truth about whats happening".

Before a crowd of more than 20,000 people in Oakland, Harris on Sunday threaded together a biography from her years in the Bay Area with her work as a prosecutor and a senator, and set those details against a broader populist vision about "running to be President of the people, by the people and for all people", reports The New York Times.

Harris, 54, who became the first Indian American and the second black woman to serve in the US Senate when she took office in 2017, has joined the most diverse field of Democratic candidates in history for the presidential bid.

"We are at an inflection point in the history of our world," she said at the rally. 

"We are at an inflection point in the history of our nation. We are here because the American dream and our American democracy are under attack and on the line like never before... When we have leaders who bully and attack a free press and undermine our democratic institutions, that's not our America."

Harris spoke of an America where "we welcome refugees" and denounced President Donald Trump's border wall plan as a "medieval vanity project".

The Senator also pledged that if she is elected President, she "will always speak with decency and moral clarity and treat all people with dignity and respect. I will lead with integrity. And I will tell the truth."

Harris announced her official bid to run for President in 2020 on January 21.