Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor publicly attacked colleague Brett Kavanaugh last week over his stance on ICE enforcement, arguing at a Kansas law school event that Kavanaugh’s elite upbringing makes him incapable of understanding illegal immigrants detained during raids.
Sotomayor made the remarks Tuesday at the University of Kansas School of Law, where she singled out Kavanaugh by name — while Kavanaugh was not present and had no opportunity to respond.
“I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,” Sotomayor said, as per Bloomberg Law, referring to Kavanaugh’s September 2025 concurring opinion that allowed the Trump administration to continue immigration enforcement operations in the Los Angeles area. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”
The concurring opinion Sotomayor targeted had upheld ICE raids in the LA region that used broad criteria, including an individual’s occupation and whether they speak Spanish, as factors in determining reasonable suspicion of illegal presence. Kavanaugh wrote at the time that such stops were “typically brief” and that most migrants “promptly go free.”
Sotomayor rejected that framing Tuesday, suggesting the economic stakes made any detention significant.
“Those hours that they took you away, nobody’s paying that person,” she said. “And that makes a difference between a meal for him and his kids that night and maybe just cold supper.”
In her September dissent, joined by the court’s other two liberal justices, Sotomayor wrote that the majority’s ruling enabled a government that could “seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.”
Kavanaugh’s opinion, by contrast, applied longstanding precedent on reasonable suspicion to immigration enforcement, noting that such stops have been conducted “across several presidential administrations.”
Sotomayor, who has previously spoken publicly about her own background growing up in a Bronx housing project, regularly frames judicial questions around lived experience and class dynamics. Critics say her remarks about Kavanaugh crossed a line, attacking a fellow justice’s character and impartiality in a public forum without giving him any opportunity to respond.
Kavanaugh attended Georgetown Preparatory School, a private Jesuit high school in North Bethesda, Maryland, before going on to Yale College and Yale Law School. Sotomayor attended Cardinal Spellman High School, a private Catholic school in the Bronx, on scholarship, then Princeton and Yale Law School.
