Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has issued a rare public apology for recent comments she made about fellow Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in which she accused the conservative of being out of touch in his opinion on a recent high-profile immigration case.
“I made remarks that were inappropriate,” Sotomayor, a liberal appointed by the Obama administration, said in a statement Wednesday to various news outlets. “I regret my hurtful comments. I have apologized to my colleague.”
Last week, during an event hosted by the University of Kansas Law School, Sotomayor accused Kavanaugh’s privileged background of blinding him to the impacts of a ruling allowing immigration agents in California to spontaneously stop migrants based on their appearances and language, according to Bloomberg Law.
Without naming Kavanaugh, Sotomayor reportedly described his concurring opinion in the September case, alleging that he was “failing to grasp the real-world effects” of the emergency decision, which allowed the stops to continue while lower court challenges play out.
“I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,” Sotomayor said at the event. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”
In his concurrence to the September high court decision, Kavanaugh wrote that such immigration stops were “typically brief” and those cleared of suspected wrongdoing were allowed to “promptly go free.”
Sotomayor’s criticism, as well as her subsequent apology, are both highly unusual for a Supreme Court justice. The high court has a long tradition of friendship and collegiality between even ideological opponents on the bench, and the court’s operations are typically highly confidential, with details of behind-the-scenes conversations rarely making it into the public eye.
Kavanaugh has not publicly responded.
The Independent has contacted the Supreme Court for comment.
Critics in the California case and beyond accuse the Trump administration of using racial profiling to make warrantless arrests of suspected immigrants as part of its mass deportation campaign.
Lower federal judges in multiple states have concluded that the administration has indiscriminately targeted people for stops based on their appearance and perceived ethnicity.
Advocates have branded these detentions “Kavanaugh stops” after the court’s 6-3 ruling in September on the tactics.
