
The nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights organization announced Wednesday that neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton will be invited to speak at its annual conference, citing the presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s “indiscriminate vilification of an entire community.”
{mosads}National Council of La Raza (NCLR) President and CEO Janet Murguía said Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, will also be excluded from the conference because of the organization’s nonpartisan nature.
Murguía said Trump has “not earned the privilege” of weighing in on the NCLR’s platform because he “has — without relent and without apology — engaged in a concerted effort to denigrate and demonize not just immigrants, but the entire 55 million-plus Latinos in this country, beginning with his kickoff speech through this month’s attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel.”
Trump began his campaign in June 2015 with a speech labeling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “criminals.”
In May of this year, Trump attacked Curiel, the judge overseeing a fraud case against Trump University.
“He’s Mexican,” Trump explained in an interview, questioning the judge’s objectivity. Curiel was born in Indiana, to Mexican parents.
The NCLR was tangentially associated with the Curiel scandal when the Trump camp associated the judge’s membership in La Raza Lawyers of San Diego, a Hispanic bar association, with the national civil rights group.
While the two organizations have similar names, they are not associated with each other. “La Raza,” translated as “the race,” is a concept created by Mexican academic José Vasconcelos in the 1920s to describe the multiracial, multicultural peoples of Latin America.
The NCLR described its decision to not extend invitations as “unprecedented.”
President Obama and GOP nominee John McCain addressed the group in 2008, as did George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000.
Earlier this month, the National Association of Latino Elected Officials held its annual conference, for which it invited all presidential candidates. Clinton and Trump declined the invitation, but Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders and Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson gave keynote speeches.
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