Judicial Process & Emergency Orders

Two Supreme Court justices publicly questioned the Court's recent willingness to grant emergency orders that favored the Trump administration, drawing attention both to interpersonal tensions on the bench and to broader institutional concerns. Justice Sonia Sotomayor apologized this week for remarks she made at a University of Kansas School of Law event that criticized a colleague's concurrence in a September 2025 order allowing ICE to resume broad sweeps in Los Angeles; in a written statement she called her comments "inappropriate," "hurtful" and said, "I have apologized to my colleague." That concurrence — written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh — had suggested ethnicity could be a relevant factor in stops and described the encounters as "brief," language that prompted Sotomayor's initial rebuke about perceived insensitivity to day laborers. Separately, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson used a nearly hour-long speech at Yale Law School to challenge the Court's increasing readiness to issue emergency stays, calling many such orders "back-of-the-envelope" rulings that fail to grapple with harms to real people and arguing the president is not harmed by being blocked from doing something illegal.