Sotomayor walks back remarks criticizing Kavanaugh, says comments were ‘inappropriate’

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Wednesday she regretted “hurtful” remarks about a colleague, apologizing in a court-issued statement after seemingly taking aim at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s perspective on immigration enforcement.

During a prior appearance at the University of Kansas School of Law, Sotomayor, without mentioning him by name, criticized Kavanaugh, “for failing to grasp the real-world effects of an unsigned order last year that allowed immigration enforcement sweeps in Los Angeles to resume.”

“I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,” Sotomayor said during the appearance, noting a Kavanaugh concurrence in an emergency appeal filed by the Trump administration, Noem v. Perdomo, a case SCOTUS stayed 6-3 in September allowing ICE to use “apparent race or ethnicity,” language and work location to justify immigration stops in California. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”

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In his concurrence opinion of the Sept. 8, 2025 stay, Kavanaugh wrote that legal residents’ encounters with immigration agents are “typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.”

Sotomayor, who filed the dissenting opinion, alleged in her remarks at KU that Kavanaugh failed to grasp that even short detentions can have major “financial consequences” for hourly workers, despite him having cited the legal reasoning of immigration stops being longstanding and based on reasonable suspicion.

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She added her “life experiences” taught her how to “think more broadly and to see things others may not,” seemingly in reference to racial profiling as the first Hispanic justice.

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In a statement released by the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Sotomayor said she “referred to a disagreement with one of my colleagues in a prior case,” but “made remarks that were inappropriate.”

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“I regret my hurtful comments,” she wrote in the statement. “I have apologized to my colleague.”