“We should not have to live in a country where Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost. I dissent.
– Justice Sonia Sotomayor
Sonia Maria Sotomayor born June 25, 1954)[2] is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1976 and received her Juris Doctor in 1979 from Yale Law School where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal
President George H. W. Bush nominated Sotomayor to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1991; she was confirmed in 1992. In 1997, President Bill Clinton nominated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She was confirmed in 1998. In May 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor to the Supreme Court following Justice David Souter’s retirement.
During her Supreme Court tenure, Sotomayor has been identified with concern for the rights of criminal defendants and criminal justice reform. She is also known for her impassioned dissents on issues of race and ethnic identity.
-Wikipedia
KRISTI NOEM, SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, ET AL. v. PEDRO VASQUEZ PERDOMO, ET AL.
ON APPLICATION FOR STAY [September 8, 2025]
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, with whom JUSTICE KAGAN and JUSTICE JACKSON join, dissenting.
In early June, the Government launched immigration enforcement raids across Los Angeles and its surrounding counties. During the raids, teams of armed and masked agents pulled up to car washes, tow yards, farms, and parks and began seizing individuals on sight, often before asking a single question.
A Federal District Court found that these raids were part of a pattern of conduct by the Government that likely violated the Fourth Amendment. Based on the evidence before it, the court held that the Government was stopping individuals based solely on four factors: (1) their apparent race or ethnicity; (2) whether they spoke Spanish or English with an accent; (3) the type of location at which they were found (such as a car wash or bus stop); and (4) the type of job they appeared to work. Concluding that stops based on these four factors alone, even when taken together, could not satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of reasonable suspicion, the District Court temporarily enjoined the Government from continuing its pattern of unlawful mass arrests while it considered whether longer-term relief was appropriate.
Instead of allowing the District Court to consider these troubling allegations in the normal course, a majority of this Court decides to take the once-extraordinary step of staying the District Court’s order. That decision is yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket. We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.
-Supremecourt.gov
Recently, at New York Law School, she stated, “Every time I listen to a lawyer-trained representative saying we should criminalize free speech in some way, I think to myself, that law school failed.”
Sotomayor also said at New York Law School, “If any student who becomes a lawyer hasn’t been taught civics, then that law school has failed,” Sotomayor added. “Because it is for that system that you’re working as a lawyer.”
In Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in the case of Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, she clearly and succinctly defended the Fourth Amendment. At the New York Law School, in like manner, she defended the First Amendment which defined and guaranteed free speech as the Founding fathers intended.
Our nation today, by some in the present administration, is being besieged by an adulteration of the meaning of free speech by calling it “criminalized” by anyone speaking out against the tyrannical actions taken by those currently in power.
The three separate and equal branches of government established in the Constitution-Executive, Judicial, and Legislative- are being threatened by the actions of some members of all three branches seeking to consolidate all three into one.
There are also members in all three branches trying to oppose such a threat from becoming a reality.
So far, this opposition is failing due to the lack of support and shameful inaction of the majority in all three branches.
It is also due to the lack of support and shameful inaction of too many citizens of our country…We the People.
Stand up and be counted; let your voices be heard; fight the good fight.
We have lost many battles…Let us not lose the War.
Do Not Be Afraid.
The 5th Amendment says:
“No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process.” It doesn’t say ”citizen”-it says person. Because even in 1791, the Founders knew:
once you deny basic rights to some, no one’s rights are safe.
– Unknown