Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor took a swipe at colleague Brett Kavanaugh over his stance on ICE raids, claiming he’s out-of-touch and couldn’t possibly know anyone who “works by the hour” because of his prep school upbringing.
The liberal justice publicly criticized Kavanaugh, a conservative, over his prior concurring opinion that essentially lifted limits on the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration raids in Los Angeles last year.
Kavanaugh had argued that any stops were “typically brief,” and that most migrants “promptly go free.”
Sotomayor assumed Kavanaugh couldn’t relate to the migrants because his parents held salaried jobs.
“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, referring to Kavanaugh, who was not there to defend himself.
“This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”
Sotomayor went on to argue that even short detentions could still financially impact people — especially hourly workers, Bloomberg Law reported.
“Those hours that they took you away, nobody’s paying that person,” she said. “And that makes a difference between a meal for him and his kids that night and maybe just cold supper.”
Kavanaugh, for his part, had issued a concurring opinion last September that allowed the Trump administration to continue ICE raids in the LA area that targeted individuals based on broad criteria, including their occupation or whether they speak Spanish.
“Immigration stops based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence have been an important component of US immigration enforcement for decades, across several presidential administrations,” Kavanaugh wrote.
At the time, Sotomayor and the court’s two other liberal justices issued a blistering dissent, writing: “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.”
