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Justice Sonia Sotomayor is taking direct aim at “Kavanaugh stops,” the race-based detentions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection that Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority blessed last year. At an event on Tuesday, Sotomayor rebuked Kavanaugh for his now-notorious opinion declaring that immigration agents may detain Latinos based, at least in part, on their “apparent ethnicity.” Kavanaugh was attempting to justify his support for a 6–3 Supreme Court decision effectively green-lighting overt racial profiling in immigration enforcement. Critics quickly dubbed these detentions “Kavanaugh stops,” thus forever associating the justice with the persecution of Latinos. Reflecting on his opinion this past Tuesday, Sotomayor stated: “I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops. This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”

On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed Sotomayor’s blunt, public reproach of her colleague and the tactical considerations that may lie behind it—especially in light of a brand-new legal challenge to “Kavanaugh stops” just filed in New York. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: Justice Sotomayor usually goes out of her way to compliment her colleagues when she does these talks, including those on the right. She focuses on collegiality and how they all respect each other. She’s made headlines for lavishing praise on Clarence Thomas in the past. So why did she aim this dagger at Kavanaugh?

Mark Joseph Stern: Well, I think this was almost certainly intentional and preplanned. When Justice Sotomayor does these public events, she generally seems to plant questions with her interlocutor that will allow her to make a statement. She knows she’s going to make news. So no........

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