Presumed GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump isn’t the first prominent politician to publicly take interest in the ethnicity of a Latino federal judge.
Before Trump and U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who certified a class-action lawsuit over Trump University, there was U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and U.S. Appeals Court nominee Miguel Estrada, who Durbin called “especially dangerous” because “he is Latino.”
Former U.S. Appeals Court nominee Miguel Estrada
Durbin’s comments were made in 2001, after President George W. Bush nominated Estrada, a native of Honduras, to the D.C. Court of Appeals.
Durbin led Democrats in blocking a vote on Estrada, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School who served as an assistant U.S. attorney and in the U.S. Justice Department, because he worried “the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment.”
Estrada, who received a unanimous “well-qualified” rating from the American Bar Association, finally withdrew amid Durbin’s two-year campaign to block a vote on his nomination. President Bush called Durbin’s treatment of Estrada “disgraceful.”
He would have been the first Hispanic ever to sit on the D.C. Court of Appeals.
“Who’s the real racist? Someone willing to air a possible bias regarding a very partisan judge’s background, or Sen. Dick Durbin, who summarily dismissed a superbly qualified judicial nominee simply on the basis he was Hispanic,” Steve Cortes, a Chicago-based financial analyst and media surrogate for the Trump campaign, said.
“For too long, Democrats like Durbin have assumed a ‘political plantation; mentality, believing they ‘own’ voters of color, even while their statist policies harm them most of all”
Durbin has been a consistent critic of Trump, telling reporters in Galesburg Sunday that “he has turned this reality TV show approach to politics into 24/7 entertainment.”
Curiel, appointed to the federal bench by President Barack Obama in 2011, was born in nearby East Chicago, Indiana. His parents immigrated from Mexico to the United States in the 1940s.
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