In a rare public criticism of a fellow member of the Supreme Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor knocked Justice Brett Kavanaugh for his justification of racial profiling in immigration-based stops of U.S. citizens.

“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, first reported by Lawrence Journal-World and Bloomberg Law. She was referring to the case of Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, in which Kavanaugh wrote an opinion framed as a concurrence to the unsigned majority ruling. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”

“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.”

Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, which the court ruled on in September 2025, challenged immigration enforcement tactics deployed during Trump’s mass deportation push in Los Angeles during the summer of that year. Immigration agents were accused of engaging in racial profiling to detain people who appeared to be Latino in order to determine their citizenship status. The court’s six conservatives blocked a lower court’s ruling banning that racial profiling from going into effect in an unwritten shadow docket decision, leaving Kavanaugh’s concurrence as the only words justifying the decision.

In that concurrence, Kavanaugh said that race or ethnicity can be a “relevant factor” when combined with other factors like “day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction” or speaking Spanish instead of English. He added that the burden of racial profiling on citizens or legal non-citizens would be minimal.

“If the person is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Only if the person is illegally in the United States may the stop lead to further immigration proceedings.”

As Sotomayor’s critique shows, these encounters are anything but brief or friendly. Citizens profiled by immigration agents have been manhandled, hit, zip-tied, kidnapped off the street and held for days in detention, sometimes without access to a lawyer. Agents also routinely refused to accept documents proving their citizenship. Citizens who have been detained include at least 20 children. These encounters have come to be known as “Kavanaugh Stops,” after the justice’s concurrence authorizing them.

In a dissent in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo joined by her two liberal colleagues, Sotomayor criticized Kavanaugh’s concurrence as “all but declared that all Latinos, U. S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.”

Kavanaugh’s insistence that these stops would be just a “brief encounter” for citizens “blinks reality,” Sotomayor wrote. “Two plaintiffs in this very case tried to explain that they are U. S. citizens; one was then pushed against a fence with his arms twisted behind his back, and the other was taken.”

Despite Kavanaugh’s concurrence seemingly authorizing these Kavanaugh Stops, the Supreme Court has not officially ruled on the use of racial profiling in roving mass deportation operations.

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