Samuel Alito Unfazed by Sonia Sotomayor's Blistering Dissent on Asylum Seekers

Sonia Sotomayor took the unusual step of reading aloud her blistering dissent to a Supreme Court ruling on asylum seekers on Thursday, and the author of the majority opinion appeared to be none too happy with her, reports the Hill. When Sotomayor wrapped up after about 10 minutes, Samuel Alito gave what Joan Bikupic of CNN characterizes as a "bitter" off-the-cuff response to her, saying if he'd known she was going to speak for so long, he would have spent more time speaking on the majority opinion. Reading a dissent from the bench is itself a relatively rare occurrence, both outlets note, and it's typically used to underscore deep disagreement.

In this case, Sotomayor called the majority "egregiously" wrong for deciding that asylum seekers could be turned away at the border because they had not technically "arrived" in the US yet. In "ordinary speech," a person doesn't arrive in a country until entering it, argued the majority opinion, but Sotomayor called that "illogical" semantics. She invoked the 1939 voyage of hundreds of Jewish refugees who were turned away from Cuba and the US, most of whom later died in the Holocaust. The ruling, she argued, betrayed the legacy of protecting people fleeing persecution. Read the full decision and the dissent here.