Lawyers for imprisoned Mexican drug lord Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán are fighting his extradition to the U.S. by citing Donald Trump's hostility toward Mexicans.

According to The New York Times, attorneys for the reputed leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel filed an injunction back in August when Guzman was still on the run, in which they directly cited some of Trump's fiery rhetoric about Mexicans as proof their client could never receive a fair trial in the U.S.

Since Guzmán's recapture on Jan. 8, it's not known if the lawyers have taken any additional steps to include their contention about Trump as part of their formal defense for keeping their client out of the hands of the U.S. government.

During a speech to launch his 2016 presidential campaign, the current GOP front-runner raged about immigrants from Mexico.

"They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists," Trump said.

Since then, the candidate has made illegal immigration a key component of his platform, at one point boasting that if he were elected, he would move to deport as many as 11 million immigrants in less than two years.

In one recent colorful tweet, Trump argued that Guzmán and Mexican cartels treated the U.S.-Mexico border "like it was a vacuum cleaner, sucking drugs and death right into the U.S.

After Guzmán was recaptured earlier this month, authorities later claimed a Rolling Stone interview the drug kingpin did with Academy Award-winning actor Sean Penn helped lead government forces to the fugitive. The interview was brokered by Mexican actress Kate del Castillo, and some security experts now speculate that the two actors could be in danger of retaliation by Guzmán's henchmen.

According to TMZ, del Castillo's relationship with Guzmán goes back several years. She once even brazenly protested she trusted him more than top officials of the Mexican government.

"Today I believe more in El Chapo Guzman than in the governments that hide the truth from me even though it is painful," the 43-year-old del Castillo wrote in a message posted to her Twitter account in 2012.

Soon after that, the two started communicating via handwritten notes and Blackberry messages. In time, Penn was allowed in on some of the conversations, reportedly using disposable phones and encrypted messages to set up his secret meeting with Guzmán.

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