By Andrew Chung
April 15 (Reuters) – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued an apology on Wednesday for her recent criticism leveled at fellow Justice Brett Kavanaugh, an unusual public mea culpa that underscores the continuing divisions within the nation’s top judicial body over its direction and actions in high-profile cases.
Sotomayor had criticized Kavanaugh at an event in Kansas last week for an opinion he wrote in September concurring with the court’s decision backing roving immigration raids in California. Kavanaugh is one of the court’s six conservative justices, while Sotomayor is the senior member of the court’s three-justice liberal bloc.
“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,” Sotomayor said in a statement released by the court.
“I have apologized to my colleague,” Sotomayor added.
In the case at issue, the court granted an emergency request by President Donald Trump’s administration to let immigration agents proceed with raids targeting people for deportation based on their race or language. A lower court judge had barred agents from stopping or detaining people without “reasonable suspicion” that they are in the United States illegally.
Kavanaugh in a concurring opinion wrote that “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion” but it can be a “‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors.”
“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go,” Kavanaugh wrote.
No other justice joined his concurring opinion.
Without mentioning Kavanaugh by name at the Kansas appearance, Sotomayor referenced his opinion and suggested he did not understand its real-world effects.
“I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,” Sotomayor said, according to a Bloomberg Law report. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”
The comments appeared to reflect her sharply worded dissent in the September case, which was joined by the other liberal justices.
The administration “has 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, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction,” Sotomayor wrote.
In recent years, Sotomayor has made public appearances emphasizing civility and camaraderie between the justices.
In January 2022, during a surge in COVID-19 infections, Sotomayor and conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch issued a statement denying a media report of a rift between them over the wearing of masks. Returning to work after the New Year, all the justices had worn masks in the courtroom except Gorsuch.
Internal divisions have periodically spilled into public view about the court’s rightward shift, its ethical standards and its actions repeatedly deciding emergency requests in favor of Trump since he returned to the presidency in January 2025.
On Monday, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a speech at Yale Law School in Connecticut, said the emergency decisions were having a corrosive effect on the judicial system.
In 2022, liberal Justice Elena Kagan told an audience that the court’s legitimacy could be imperiled if Americans come to view its members as trying to impose personal preferences on society, in the wake of rulings powered by her conservative colleagues curtailing abortion access and widening gun rights.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
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