Judicial Process & Emergency Orders

Two of the Supreme Court’s liberal justices publicly questioned the court’s recent use of emergency orders that have enabled parts of the Trump administration’s immigration and other policies. At Yale Law School, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson delivered an hour‑long critique of conservative justices’ emergency stays, calling many such orders “back‑of‑the‑envelope, first‑blush impressions” and “scratch‑paper musings” that the Court then expects lower courts to follow; she warned the Court has become “noticeably less restrained,” argued that a president is not harmed by being blocked from attempting something illegal, and said she raised the matter internally before speaking publicly to be a “catalyst for change.” Separately, Justice Sonia Sotomayor apologized after remarks at a University of Kansas School of Law event that criticized a colleague’s concurrence in a September 2025 order that allowed ICE to resume broad immigration sweeps in Los Angeles; she called her comments “inappropriate,” “hurtful,” and said, “I have apologized to my colleague.” That concurrence had said ethnicity could be a relevant factor and described the stops as a “brief encounter,” language that prompted Sotomayor’s sharp earlier critique about the author’s background.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has publicly criticized the Supreme Court’s conservative justices for repeatedly issuing emergency orders that have favored the second Trump administration, arguing that the Court’s speedy interventions risk undermining the normal judicial process and the rule of law. Her remarks came amid an extraordinary surge in such rulings: as of April 7, 2026 the Court had issued 35 emergency orders related to the second Trump administration — a marked increase from past administrations and a statistic frequently cited by critics as evidence the emergency docket is being used far more aggressively than before.