Sotomayor gives Kavanaugh reality check: 'Doesn't know any person who works by the hour'

A Supreme Court Justice has criticized a colleague appointed by Donald Trump for failing to grasp the severity of the administration's immigration policy.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor hit out at her colleague, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, during an event yesterday (April 7). Sotomayor, appointed in 2009 by President Barack Obama, criticized the September 8 emergency order which meant lower court rulings were to be paused indefinitely.

This means immigration agents have a wider scope for profiling people and are free to target them based on their language, occupation, race, or presence at specific locations like bus stops, Bloomberg Law reported. Sotomayor referenced a piece by Kavanaugh while delivering a speech at the University of Kansas School of Law.

She said, "I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops. 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 claim that even short-term detentions can affect those wrongly arrested by immigration agents. "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."

"Life experiences teach you to think more broadly and to see things others may not. And when I have a moment where I can express that on behalf of people who have no other voice, then I’m being given a very rare privilege."

Kavanaugh's concurrence with the immigration stops and the lower court suspension, according to Sotomayor, "relegates the interests of U.S. citizens and individuals with legal status to a single sentence, positing that the Government will free these individuals as soon as they show they are legally in the United States."

Justice Kavanaugh authored a controversial concurrence supporting immigration stops based on ethnicity and language. He wrote that "apparent ethnicity" could be a "relevant factor" in immigration enforcement.

However, he later attempted to walk back these remarks, stating officers "must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity," though legal experts criticized this as insufficient damage control for his earlier endorsement of racial profiling.