Hillary Clinton’s campaign slammed Donald Trump’s criticism of the judge overseeing the Trump University lawsuit, ripping the presumptive Republican nominee in a statement for targeting the U.S.-born judge’s Hispanic descent.
“The fact that Donald Trump doesn’t see Judge Curiel and his family as Americans makes him unfit to be president of this great nation, a nation of immigrants,” Lorella Praeli, director of Latino outreach for the Clinton campaign, said in a statement.
Trump has controversially gone after U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is presiding over a class-action lawsuit against Trump’s now-defunct training program in California, and suggested his “Mexican heritage” could prevent him from judging Trump fairly as a result of Trump’s strident anti-immigration rhetoric.
He told The Wall Street Journal that “it’s an inherent conflict of interest” for Curiel to sit on the case because Trump has proposed building a border wall between the United States and Mexico.
In the statement from the Clinton campaign, Praeli praised Curiel’s experience and qualifications, saying, “Judge Curiel and his family epitomize the American Dream. His parents worked hard to give their U.S.-born children a better life. He and his brother became successful lawyers. His other brother served in Vietnam.”
“In Trump’s version of America, this Latino family isn’t really America. But they are America. And Hillary Clinton will fight for ALL Americans,” Praeli wrote.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Curiel, who was born in Indiana, is at the center of the controversy surrounding the Trump University lawsuit. He allowed for the “playbooks” about Trump’s embattled namesake school to be opened to the public, saying there is now public interest in them since Trump “became the front-runner in the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential race, and has placed the integrity of these court proceedings at issue.”
Trump in, in addition to campaign aides, has repeatedly brought up Curiel’s heritage while questioning his ability to judge the case, and has also criticized Curiel for his membership in the former La Raza Lawyer’s Association, which is a leading Latino lawyers group in California.
