Sotomayor apologizes for 'hurtful' comments about Kavanaugh

WASHINGTON − Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor apologized for making what she called "inappropriate" and "hurtful" comments about fellow Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

“I regret my hurtful comments,” Sotomayor said in a statement on April 15. “I have apologized to my colleague.”

Her statement came about a week after she criticized Kavanaugh’s opinion in the court’s 2025 decision about immigration-related stops in Los Angeles. The stops sparked widespread protests in California and many people decried them, saying they were based on racial profiling.

Over the objections of the court's three liberal justices, including Sotomayor's, the court blocked a lower court ruling that said federal agents need to have reasonable suspicion that the person they’re questioning is in the country illegally.

“I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,” Sotomayor said during a public appearance at the University of Kansas School of Law. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”

Sotomayor added, “Those hours that they took you away, nobody’s paying that person,” she said of those detained. “And that makes a difference between a meal for him and his kids that night and maybe just cold supper," Bloomberg Law reported she told the crowd.

In his opinion for the court, Kavanaugh said that legal residents’ encounters with immigration agents are “typically brief,” and impacted individuals “promptly go free."

The legal challenge came after the Trump administration ramped up immigration raids across California starting in June 2025, widening its focus from those with criminal records to a broader sweep for anyone in the country without authorization.

In dissenting remarks in 2025, Sotomayor slammed the court's decision.

“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job,” Sotomayor wrote. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent."

After Sotomayor's remarks in Kansas last week, court watcher and lawyer David Lat called it “striking to see a justice criticize a colleague outside a written opinion, in a public appearance, and in somewhat personal terms.”

“Yes, justices go after each other in opinions—but they typically “leave it on the page,” i.e., don’t bring up their grievances in other contexts,” Lat recently wrote on Substack.

In public remarks on April 9, Sotomayor said she has a civil relationship with "virtually all" of her fellow justices, and that she regards many of them as friends.

Sotomayor said her experience as a trial court judge has helped her to see the real people behind the cases she now rules on, but she isn't sure all her colleagues also see those people.

"I still see the people when I read the transcripts," Sotomayor said, referring to transcripts of proceedings that take place in a trial court, where individuals involved in the underlying events in a case can give testimony. "I don't know how many of my colleagues do."

Contributing: Aysha Bagchi.