Liberal SCOTUS Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused one of Donald Trump’s appointees to the nation’s top court of being clueless about the impact of the policies they’re being asked to rule on.
Sotomayor ripped into Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump appointed amid significant controversy to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by Anthony Kennedy in 2018, during a Tuesday event at the University of Kansas, Bloomberg reports.
Her anger was largely directed at Kavanaugh’s concurrence with an emergency order last September that paused prior rulings, issued by the lower courts, barring immigration agents from going after people based on their race, employment, language or presence at car washes, bus stops, and other working locations.
“I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,” Sotomayor said. Kavanaugh had written in a concurrence with that emergency order that migrants’ encounters with law enforcement tend to be “typically brief,” and that most “promptly go free.”
“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. “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.”
Sotomayor’s journey to the nation’s top court began in very modest circumstances. She was born in a housing project in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents in 1954 and was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at a young age. Her father died when she was 9, after which her mother raised her and her brother alone, working long hours to provide for the family.
Kavanaugh, meanwhile, grew up far more comfortably. His father was a lawyer and business executive, and his mother was a judge. He attended Georgetown Preparatory School, an elite private learning establishment known for educating students from affluent and politically connected families.
Early in his career, Kavanaugh also clerked for influential judges and eventually for Supreme Court Justice Kennedy, whose seat he would later fill. Still, the controversy around Trump’s decision to appoint Kavanaugh to that role owed less to his prior relationship with the departing judge than to the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct that emerged in the course of his confirmation hearing.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Supreme Court to request comment from Kavanaugh for this story.
