Conservative Justice Samuel Alito shocked Supreme Court observers on Thursday by lobbing a sneering dig at his liberal colleague, Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Alito, 76, shattered the court’s veneer of civility after Sotomayor, 72, read her blistering dissent in a 6-3 ruling that dealt a major blow to asylum seekers, holding that migrants waiting on the Mexican side of the southern border have not legally “arrived in the United States” and therefore are not entitled to statutory inspection and asylum-processing requirements.
Sotomayor spent nearly 12 minutes “calmly” reading her dissent from the bench as her colleagues watched, MS NOW legal analyst Lisa Rubin said. Reading a dissent—the most pointed possible show of disapproval open to justices—is uncommon but falls squarely within the court’s norms.
But after Sotomayor finished speaking, Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, responded with an extraordinary display of open contempt, according to Rubin, who cited reporting from MS NOW producer Peggy Helman inside the courtroom.
“There’s much I would have added if I had known a dissent would be read from the bench,” the ultra-conservative justice reportedly said, leaving observers stunned.
Rubin said Helman reported that “people in the Supreme Court, in the gallery gasped when he said that because this is a group of people that, for all of their differences in terms of legal, interpretive methodology or even the outcome of cases, they like to make it seem as if they get along; that they are all just rowing in the same direction, trying to do their job to uphold the rule of law, even when their conceptions of what the rule of law... differs.”
She added, “That very obvious public fracture between the two of them was one that was surprising even to the most veteran court watchers in the room today.”
CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst Joan Biskupic, who was also inside the court, called Alito’s remark a “very bitter response,” and questioned whether Sotomayor had given advance notice that she would read her dissent from the bench.
“What happened in the courtroom showed not just the division but the anger between the two sides,” Biskupic told CNN host Wolf Blitzer.
She said that Alito, whom then-President George W. Bush appointed to the court in 2005, moved on to read the next decision with “anger dripping from his voice.”
Alito earned bipartisan support during his confirmation process, but is now widely seen as one of the most MAGA-friendly and overtly political justices.
Days after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, Alito flew an upside-down American flag outside his house—a symbol adopted by Trump supporters contesting Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud, a 2024 report from The New York Times revealed. Alito blamed the incident on his wife, claiming she was the one who flew the flag in response to a dispute with their neighbors.
In 2023, Alito flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his beach house on the Jersey Shore, the Times reported. While the flag was adopted as a symbol during the Revolutionary War, in modern times it has been associated with Christian nationalists and was carried by rioters during the Capitol attack.
In her dissent on Thursday, Sotomayor, who was appointed by then-President Barack Obama in 2009, accused the court of effectively creating a roadmap for future administrations to evade asylum laws altogether simply by preventing migrants from stepping onto U.S. soil.
“The consequences of today’s decision are predictable,” she said. “More people will die.”
Under the court’s reasoning, Sotomayor argued, “so long as the noncitizens are kept one inch away from U.S. soil, the Government has no duty to inspect them or accept their asylum applications.”
The liberal justice also invoked the history of the MS St. Louis, a ship carrying Jewish refugees that was turned away by the U.S. government in 1939 and ultimately returned to Europe, where many passengers were later killed in the Holocaust.
“If the refugees on the MS St. Louis were to walk up to a port of entry on our southern border today, the majority’s interpretation would allow immigration officers to refuse even to consider their asylum applications by physically blocking them from stepping foot onto U.S. soil,” Sotomayor wrote.
