Sonia Sotomayor Is Apologizing After She Criticized One of Her Fellow Justices

The Supreme Court is not supposed to be partisan, but it's been hard to deny over the last 20 years that the justices have become much more willing to act on behalf of the political parties they belonged to before joining the Court.

Now, there's a 6-3 conservative majority on the Court, which has meant that Justice Sonia Sotomayor and her fellow liberal justices are often forced to write fairly fiery dissents.

In April of 2026, though, Sotomayor apologized after criticizing one of her fellow justices in public. Here's what we know about what she said.

Sotomayor made the original comment at an event at the University of Kansas School of Law, where she was discussing a concurring opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh in which he suggested that ICE could make stops based on skin color.

“I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,” Sotomayor said, according to a Bloomberg report. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”

All in all, that criticism is a fairly mild one, but one that Sotomayor nevertheless felt the need to take accountability for.

“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,” Sotomayor said in a statement. “I regret my hurtful comments. I have apologized to my colleague.”

The case in question came before the Court in early September, and the Court didn't actually a formal opinion in the case, instead just allowing the Trump administration to continue approaching individuals they suspected of being in the country illegally. Kavanaugh provided his own rationale, saying that apparent ethnicity was among the factors agents could consider in questioning someone, and that it didn't constitute discrimination.

“To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors,” he wrote at the time. “Importantly, reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and inquire about immigration status.”

In the months since Kavanaugh issued that opinion, critics of it have started to refer to stops in which someone appears to have been questioned only because of their apparent ethnicity as "Kavanaugh stops." Critics have also argued that the stops are often far lengthier and more invasive than Kavanaugh has suggested.

Of course, that appears to have been part of what Sotomayor was suggesting when she argued that he is somewhat disconnected from the way the world actually works. The Supreme Court, which has historically been defined by comity between its members, has seem that comity fray as the partisan instincts of the justices have come to the fore.