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sonia sotomayor
As Sotomayor Apologizes to Kavanaugh, Thomas Paints Progressives as Existential Threat
"Cowering liberals think this is a manners contest while conservatives are waging an ideological war," said one observer.
Apr 16, 2026
While one liberal US Supreme Court justice apologized Wednesday for mildly condescending remarks about a colleague, one of the high court's most right-wing members compared progressives to the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler—a contrast that one prominent observer called "a perfect commentary on the asymmetry in politics" between liberals and the MAGA right.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she apologized for "inappropriate" public comments about Justice Brett Kavanaugh's upbringing during an April 7 speech at the University of Kansas School of Law. Sotomayor, who grew up in financial poverty in the Bronx, referred to Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, in which the son of high-powered Washington, DC attorneys brushed off the potentially fatal consequences of immigration enforcement stops.
“This is from a man whose parents were professionals," Sotomayor told the audience, "and probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”
Meanwhile on Wednesday, Justice Clarence Thomas linked the progressive movement—which Americans have to thank for many of the rights they have today, from the five-day, 40-hour workweek, to food safety and environmental protection, to near-universal civil and voting rights—with some of the 20th century's worst mass murderers.
"Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government," Thomas told attendees of a University of Texas event commemorating the 250th anniversary of the document's signing. "It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government."
Thomas called the declaration "one of the greatest anti-slavery documents in the history of the Western civilization," even though its proclamation that "all men are created equal" did not apply to the 20% of the American population who were enslaved Blacks, and a condemnation of slavery was stricken from the draft due to objections from slave owners.
However, Thomas argued that the ideals in the Declaration of Independence have "fallen out of favor" among progressives.
"Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement, with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War, to openly oppose the principles of the declaration" Thomas asserted. "Progressives strove to undo the declaration's commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident."
"It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights," he continued, adding that it "led to the governments that caused the most awful century that the world has ever seen."
"Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism, and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our declaration are based," Thomas added, referring to Soviet leader Josef Stalin, the Nazi leader, and Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong.
Balls and Strikes editor-in-chief Jay Willis responded to Thomas' remarks on Bluesky, writing that it is "genuinely funny that Sonia Sotomayor issued a public apology today for her mild criticism of a conservative colleague on a specific, substantive issue, and then a few hours later Clarence Thomas picked up a mic and was like ALL LIBERALS ARE AMERICA-HATING COWARDS."
"Clarence Thomas is a right-wing freak," Willis added. "This is an indistinguishable from what unironic retvrn guys post on X about, like, women being allowed to have bank accounts. Anyone who tells you he is a profound thinker or a serious jurist or whatever is not to be trusted."
Journalist Mehdi Hasan said on X that "if Dems had a spine, they’d run on impeaching this financially corrupt justice who got away with the allegations of sexual harassment during his hearings."
Many right-wingers, meanwhile, applauded Thomas' remarks, with Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah)—who helped try to steal the 2020 election for President Donald Trump—posting on X that "progressivism *is* an existential threat to America."
During his speech, Thomas also expressed his admiration for Harlan Crow, the Republican megadonor whose largesse to the justice and his wife Virginia—who was also involved in efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election—has included undisclosed gifts like luxury vacations and private school tuition for a relative.
He also praised John Yoo, his former clerk and senior Justice Department lawyer who authored the infamous "torture memos" for the George W. Bush administration and publicly argued that the president has the power to order the massacre of an entire village of civilians or the crushing of a child's testicles.
Thomas closed his speech with a call to action.
"Each of you will have opportunities to be courageous every day," he said. "It may mean speaking up in class tomorrow when someone around you expects you to live by lies. It may mean confronting today's fashionable bigotries, such as antisemitism. It may mean standing up for your religion when it is mocked and disparaged by a professor."
"It may mean not budging on your principles when it will entail losing friends or being ostracized," he continued. "It may mean running for your school board when you see that they are teaching your children to hate your values and our country. It may mean turning down a job offer that requires you to make moral or ethical compromises."
This, from a justice on the nation's highest court whose moral and ethical compromises in the form of “the number, value, and extravagance of the gifts" he took from a billionaire linked to a case before that same court has "no comparison in modern American history," according to a Senate report.
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'Now Imagine... You Are Suffocating': Sotomayor's Graphic Dissent Over Nitrogen Gas Execution
The liberal justice accused the majority of turning their back "on the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment."
Oct 24, 2025
US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was unable to convince the right-wing majority of the nation's highest court on Thursday night to accept a last-ditch petition from a man slated to be killed by the state of Alabama asking that he be put to death by firing squad as opposed to the more brutal and painful method of asphyxiation from nitrogen gas, a torturous process of execution experts have said amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
Anthony Boyd, convicted of a 1993 murder and kidnapping, which he maintained until the end that he did not commit, was put to death by the state of Alabama using nitrogen gas after a request for a stay of execution and a review of a lower appeals court ruling was rejected in a 6-3 decision.
In the first four paragraphs of her dissent, backed by Justices Elana Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor departed from the majority by asking people to put themselves inside the death chamber with the mask of nitrogen strapped to their face:
Take out your phone, go to the clock app, and find the stopwatch. Click start. Now watch the seconds as they climb. Three seconds come and go in a blink. At the thirty-second mark, your mind starts to wander. One minute passes, and you begin to think that this is taking a long time. Two . . . three . . . . The clock ticks on. Then, finally, you make it to four minutes. Hit stop.
Now imagine for that entire time, you are suffocating. You want to breathe; you have to breathe. But you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas. Your mind knows that the gas will kill you. But your body keeps telling you to breathe.
That is what awaits Anthony Boyd tonight. For two to four minutes, Boyd will remain conscious while the State of Alabama kills him in this way. When the gas starts flowing, he will immediately convulse. He will gasp for air. And he will thrash violently against the restraints holding him in place as he experiences this intense psychological tor- ment until he finally loses consciousness. Just short of twenty minutes later, Boyd will be declared dead.
Boyd asks for the barest form of mercy: to die by firing squad, which would kill him in seconds, rather than by a torturous suffocation lasting up to four minutes. The Constitution would grant him that grace. My colleagues do not. This Court thus turns its back on Boyd and on the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment. Because the Court should have instead granted a stay of execution and Boyd’s petition for certiorari, I respectfully dissent.
Last year, a body of experts at the United Nations urgently pleaded with US officials to put a stop to the death penalty by nitrogen hypoxia, calling it "clearly prohibited under international law." The experts cited the killing of Kenneth Smith by the state of Alabama in February of 2024 as the "first person ever to be executed in this way," a death which reportedly took more than 20 minutes as Smith "writhed and convulsed on the gurney."
The wife of another man executed by this method—approved by seven states, but only put to use so far by Alabama and Louisiana—said watching her husband be killed this way was like “watching someone drown without water.”
Citing the seven times the method had been used before Boyd, Sotomayor said there is now a clear record of the intense pain and unnecessary suffering experienced by people put to death in this manner. All the killings, she wrote, resulted in a similar experience: "apparent consciousness for minutes, not seconds; and violent convulsing, eyes bulging, consistent thrashing against the restraints, and clear gasping for the air that will not come."
While the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution “does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death," argued Sotomayor, "when a State introduces an experimental method of execution that superadds psychological terror as a necessary feature of its successful completion, courts should enforce the Eighth Amendment’s mandate against cruel and unusual punishment."
She called for Boyd to be spared the excruciating death, given that a less cruel and painful alternative was readily available, and an end to the use of nitrogen hypoxia nationwide. While Kagan and Jackson agreed, the other six justices allowed the execution to proceed.
Before he was killed, according to CBS News, Boyd pleaded his innocence for a final time on Thursday. "I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t participate in killing anybody,” he said. “There can be no justice until we change this system.”
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With the Perdomo Decision, the Supreme Court's Republicans Are Enablers of Racism
The shadow-docket ruling means ICE will be free to ramp up its roving masked raids in Los Angeles and other cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. There are no longer any safe zones.
Sep 19, 2025
In what may be its most reactionary ruling since Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court decided on September 8 to allow the Trump administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to resume overt racial profiling in immigration raids in Los Angeles. The raids, which began in June under the title of Operation At Large, have resulted in some 5,000 arrests.
The order was handed down in the case of Noem v. Perdomo on the court’s emergency, or “shadow,” docket, which consists of cases decided on an expedited basis—without comprehensive briefing and without oral arguments—outside of the normal “merits docket.” The order lifts a lower-court injunction that had barred the administration from detaining suspected undocumented immigrants based solely on their ethnicity, language, geographic location, and occupations.
Like most shadow docket rulings, the Perdomo order is bare-bones, comprising a single paragraph that fails to explain the court’s rationale for its decision. Nonetheless, it sends a clear message: If you are Latino, you’d better start carrying your identification papers with you—and they had better be in order. Otherwise, you will be subject to detention, and you might just find yourself on a deportation flight to El Salvador, South Sudan, or Uganda.
The Perdomo litigation originated with a lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of immigration advocacy organizations and five individuals, including two US citizens who contend they were detained by ICE during Operation At Large in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. On July 11, Los Angeles District Court Judge Maame E. Frimpong issued a temporary restraining order against the administration, finding that a “mountain of evidence” supported the plaintiffs’ claims that “roving patrols” of masked federal agents were conducting indiscriminate and sometimes violent dragnet-style immigration raids of workplaces and communities.
The court’s quick overturning of Frimpong’s TRO comes as no surprise. Although the court has a long history of entertaining emergency appeals that bypass the normal appeals process—such as last-minute requests for stays of execution in death penalty cases—no president has relied on the shadow docket more than Donald Trump. According to Georgetown University law professor and shadow docket scholar Steve Vladeck, the first Trump administration sought emergency relief 41 times. By comparison, the George W. Bush and Obama administrations filed a combined total of eight emergency relief requests over a 16-year period while the Biden administration filed 19 applications across four years.
During its recently completed 2024-25 term, the court’s shadow docket exploded to more than 100 cases, fueled by the second Trump administration’s authoritarian power grab. In addition to Perdomo, the court has issued pro-Trump shadow docket orders permitting noncitizens to be deported to third-party countries with histories of egregious human rights violations; barring transgender people from serving in the military; withholding $65 million in teacher training grants to states that include diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in their operations and curriculums; and endorsing the Department of Government Efficiency’s access to Social Security Administration records, to cite just a few instances.
And while shadow docket decisions are technically “interim” in nature—operating to remand cases to the lower courts for additional proceedings and leaving space for a possible return to the Supreme Court—they have enduring practical consequences. Unless and until the Supreme Court takes up the Perdomo case again, for example, ICE will be free to ramp up its roving masked raids in Los Angeles and other cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. There are no longer any safe zones.
Of the high court’s six Republican ideologues, only Brett Kavanaugh explained his reasoning in Perdomo. In a poorly crafted opinion filled with misstatements of fact and law, Kavanaugh cited provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act and a 1975 Supreme Court case (United States v. Brignoni-Ponce) that authorize immigration agents to briefly detain and question individuals if they have a “reasonable suspicion” (less than probable cause but more than a hunch) that the person being questioned is an alien illegally in the country. From there, however, Kavanaugh dropped the proverbial ball by remarking, without any citations to the trial court’s evidentiary record:
The Government estimates that at least 15 million people are in the United States illegally. Many millions illegally entered (or illegally overstayed) just in the last few years.
Illegal immigration is especially pronounced in the Los Angeles area, among other locales in the United States. About 10% of the people in the Los Angeles region are illegally in the United States—meaning about 2 million illegal immigrants out of a total population of 20 million.
Not surprisingly given those extraordinary numbers, US immigration officers have prioritized immigration enforcement in the Los Angeles area. The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English. If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go. If the individual is illegally in the United States, the officers may arrest the individual and initiate the process for removal.
Given what he took for granted as the outsized illegal alien population in greater Los Angeles, Kavanaugh reasoned that it is “common sense” (his words, trust me) for ICE agents to detain any Latinos who fit the government’s criteria of suspicion based on their race, language, or employment in low wage jobs.
In a blistering 21-page dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by fellow Democrats Elena Kaga and Ketanji Brown Jackson, took Kavanaugh to school, instructing the former Yale frat boy that the reasonable suspicion standard requires:
“… an individualized suspicion that a particular citizen was engaged in a particular crime” beyond just a “demographic profile...”
The Fourth Amendment thus prohibits exactly what the Government is attempting to do here: seize individuals based solely on a set of facts that ‘describe[s] a very large category of presumably innocent’ people… As the District Court correctly held, the four factors [the administration relies on]—apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or English with an accent, location, and type of work—are no more indicative of illegal presence in the country than of legal presence.
Sotomayor also educated Kavanaugh on the harsh on-the-ground realities of Operation At Large, noting several examples from the trial court record of violence and intimidation. In the LA suburb of Glendale, for instance:
…nearly a dozen masked agents with guns “jumped out of… cars” at a Home Depot, and began “chasing and tackl[ing] Latino day laborers without “identify[ing] themselves as ICE or police, ask[ing] questions, or say[ing] anything else… In downtown Los Angeles, agents “jumped out of a van, rushed up to [a tamale vendor], surrounded him, and handled him violently,” all “[w]ithout asking… any questions.
In still another Home Depot encounter drawn from the evidentiary record, masked agents wearing bulletproof vests got out of a car and tear-gassed a crowd that had gathered to witness a raid. Far from being polite and respectful, Sotomayor continued, Operation At Large has sparked “panic and fear” across Los Angeles and its surrounding areas. “Countless people in the Los Angeles area,” she observed, “have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.”
The Fourth Amendment, she reminded her Republican colleagues, “protects every individual’s constitutional right to be free from arbitrary interference by law officers.” Sadly, she concluded, after the Perdomo ruling, “that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little.”
As a Supreme Court justice constrained by the need for collegiality on the bench, Sotomayor stopped short of denouncing Kavanaugh and the court’s Republicans as enablers of racism. There is no reason for the rest of us to feel so reserved.
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