Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Wednesday evening issued an unusual public apology to fellow Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, saying remarks she made about his stance in an immigration case were “inappropriate” and “hurtful.”
The personal swipe came during a talk at the University of Kansas School of Law last week, when Sotomayor suggested that Kavanaugh lacked the life experience to appreciate the potential impacts of his opinion on immigration stops. He “probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour,” Sotomayor said, according to news reports. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals.”
In September 2025, Kavanaugh wrote an opinion that supported lifting limits on immigration raids in the Los Angeles area.
In a statement issued through the court, Sotomayor called her remarks “inappropriate.”
“I regret my hurtful comments,” Sotomayor added, saying they had stemmed from a “disagreement with a colleague” in a previous case. “I have apologized to my colleague.”
The extraordinary public apology highlights rifts on the court dominated by a 6-3 conservative majority. Sotomayor, a liberal nominated by President Barack Obama, has frequently written dissents as the court’s majority has sided with the Trump administration in a host of cases challenging its agenda. Until last week, however, Sotomayor’s criticism had largely come in writing, hewing to the legal issues and their possible effects.
Frustration felt by other justices has burst into the open, though it usually centers on issues of policy or process.
During a public forum in March, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson criticized the conservative majority for being too quick to issue rulings that have temporarily allowed some of President Donald Trump’s controversial policies to go forward on a preliminary basis. The comments by the liberal justice came in response to an assertion by Kavanaugh, who was also in attendance, that the high court had treated Trump and Democratic President Joe Biden similarly.
“This is not a new phenomenon in the Trump administration,” said Kavanaugh, a conservative.
Jackson echoed her criticisms during a talk at Yale Law School this week, calling the emergency docket orders “back-of-the-envelope, first-blush impressions of the merits of the legal issue,” according to the Guardian.
In his emergency docket opinion concerning immigration raids in Los Angeles, Kavanaugh wrote that immigration officers can consider a person’s race, language and occupation in forming a reason to stop someone for an immigration check.
“To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Sotomayor, joined by the court’s two other liberal justices, dissented.
“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job,” Sotomayor wrote.
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