Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor apologized Wednesday for publicly criticizing a colleague over a ruling on immigration stops and for remarks that appeared to question his familiarity with working-class people.
“At a recent appearance at the University of Kansas School of Law, I referred to a disagreement with one of my colleagues in a prior case, but I made remarks that were inappropriate,” Sotomayor said in a statement issued by the Supreme Court. “I regret my hurtful comments. I have apologized to my colleague.” She did not name Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the statement.
At a Kansas event last week, Sotomayor reportedly offered rare and personal criticism of a September 2025 Supreme Court order in which Kavanaugh was the sole member of the majority to explain his reasoning in writing. The order cleared the way for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to resume broad sweeps in Los Angeles by halting a lower court ruling that had restricted ICE practices. That lower court had found the agency unlawfully detained people and said ICE could not rely solely on factors such as race, occupation or speaking Spanish to establish reasonable suspicion of immigration status.
Kavanaugh’s concurrence questioned the lower court’s findings, saying ethnicity could be a relevant factor though not the sole reason for a stop, and describing the immigration stops as typically a “brief encounter” in which detainees are free to go once they demonstrate they are in the country legally. At the Kansas appearance, Sotomayor cited a colleague who wrote that “these are only temporary stops,” and added, according to news reports, “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”
Kavanaugh, a native of the Washington, D.C., area, is the son of a lobbyist father and a mother who was a prosecutor and judge. Sotomayor grew up in Bronx public housing, was primarily raised by her Puerto Rico-born mother — a nurse — after her father died when she was nine. Both justices attended Yale Law School, about 11 years apart.
Publicly criticizing a colleague’s background is unusual for the justices, who typically stress that their differences are legal rather than personal. Sotomayor previously described the nine justices as a “family” in a 2018 interview and has said she generally maintains civil or friendly relationships with most colleagues.
When the court issued the order on ICE stops, Sotomayor dissented, joined by the court’s two other liberal justices, warning that the government — and Kavanaugh’s concurrence — had “all but declared that all Latinos, U.S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time.” “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. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent,” she wrote.