Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor publicly shamed her colleague, Brett Kavanaugh, after one of his rulings became a point of public ridicule.
“I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,” Sotomayor said while speaking at the University of Kansas School of Law, Bloomberg Law reported Wednesday morning. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”
Kavanaugh penned a ruling in September in which he claimed that Hispanic residents’ “apparent ethnicity” could be a “relevant factor” in federal agents’ decision to pull them over and demand proof of citizenship. His reasoning, he wrote, is that these were “brief investigative stops."
“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) promptly began using the opinion as the standard, and stops of anyone driving while Hispanic have resulted in many Americans and legal residents being nabbed and detained for long periods. In some cases, federal agents outright brutalized, kidnapped, and tormented people simply due to their ethnicity, noted Slate in one report.
It has become so bad that a group of police chiefs from Minnesota was forced to speak out that all of their officers who were people of color had been pulled over by federal agents and harassed.
The concurrence has been forever enshrined as the "Kavanaugh Stop." Rarely, if ever, does a Supreme Court case become the source of such immediate ridicule that it becomes a viral colloquialism adopted into pop culture vernacular.
Sotomayor didn't name Kavanaugh specifically, but it was clear the case and rulings she was speaking about.
“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.”
In 170 cases, U.S. citizens were detained for days, kicked and brutalized, one ProPublic report revealed, just one month after Kavanaugh's ruling.
As the only Latino person on the court, Sotomayor said that she has a responsibility to speak out when her white, privileged colleagues are ignorant of the daily reality most Americans live with.
“Life experiences teach you to think more broadly and to see things others may not,” Sotomayor said. “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.”
However, when she wrote her dissent, she said she was trying to explain to Kavanaugh that he would be responsible for overturning years of court precedent.
“I was not talking as a Latino justice,” she said. “I was talking about a justice who respects precedent. And I was explaining why that precedent is being violated.”
