In a rare public criticism of a fellow member of the Supreme Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor knocked Justice Brett Kavanaugh for his justification of racial profiling in immigration-based stops of U.S. citizens.
“I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,” Sotomayor said at a University of Kansas School of Law event on Tuesday, first reported by Lawrence Journal-World and Bloomberg Law. She was referring to the case of Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, in which Kavanaugh wrote an opinion framed as a concurrence to the unsigned majority ruling. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”
“Those hours that they took you away, nobody’s paying that person,” she added. “And that makes a difference between a meal for him and his kids that night and maybe just cold supper.”
Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, which the court ruled on in September 2025, challenged immigration enforcement tactics deployed during Trump’s mass deportation push in Los Angeles during the summer of that year. Immigration agents were accused of engaging in racial profiling to detain people who appeared to be Latino in order to determine their citizenship status. The court’s six conservatives blocked a lower court’s ruling banning that racial profiling from going into effect in an unwritten shadow docket decision, leaving Kavanaugh’s concurrence as the only words justifying the decision.
