Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued an apology Wednesday for remarks she made criticizing a colleague’s background while discussing a case on immigration stops.
In a statement released by the Court, Sotomayor said: “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. I regret my hurtful comments. I have apologized to my colleague.” The statement did not name Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Last week at the Kansas event, Sotomayor criticized a September 2025 Supreme Court order in which Kavanaugh was the only justice in the majority to explain his reasoning in writing. That order allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to resume broad sweeps in Los Angeles by pausing a lower court ruling that had limited some ICE practices. The lower court had concluded 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 might be a relevant factor although not the sole basis for a stop, and describing the immigration stops as typically a “brief encounter” during which a person could be free to leave after showing lawful presence. At the Kansas appearance, Sotomayor cited a colleague who wrote that “these are only temporary stops,” and, according to news reports, added: “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 and 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, roughly 11 years apart.
Publicly criticizing a colleague’s background is rare for the justices, who generally emphasize that their disagreements are legal rather than personal. Sotomayor has previously described the nine justices as a “family” and has said she tries to maintain 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.” She wrote: “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.”