Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who will swear-in Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris on January 20, is one of the few who stood up to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In a June 2020 judgement, it was Sotomayor who held individual liberty over Donald Trump’s speedy deportation process when leftists on the bench, including Ginsburg and Bayer were of the other opinion. Homeland Security vs Thuraissigiam saw the public opinion for one time grill RBG as her much younger colleague, Sonia Sotomayor stood on the other side even when the result – quite lopsided – went 7-2.

Sotomayor, in her dissent, said the majority’s decision “handcuffs the Judiciary’s ability to perform its constitutional duty to safeguard individual liberty and dismantles a critical component of the separation of powers,” NBC reported.

She was appointed as the first Latina and Hispanic on the Apex court bench by President Barack Obama.

Sotomayor, whose father passed away when she was 9 years old, was raised by her mother, Celina. She and her brother – who is now a doctor – instilled strong independent values from a mother who had served in the Woman Army Corps during World War II.

In this clip from an episode of ‘Oprah’s Next Chapter’, Justice Sotomayor spoke about her mother’s parenting philosophies. She said that a mother, raising two successful children came down to a simple conscious choice: “She will tell you that she did it by not interfering.”

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In her book ‘My Beloved World’, the first Hispanic judge on the US Supreme Court bench said that her successes owe to a fierce love of education – a value her mother instilled in both of her children by telling them, “It doesn’t matter how good your grades are. I just want to know that you studied. The rest will work itself out.”

With more than a dozen accolades against her name, Sotomayor holds a strong voice against racial discrimination. In fact, she declared that the court erred by rejecting claims that anti-Mexican and anti-Latino racial hostility was at the root of President Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals initiative, a Boston Globe report states. Kari E Hong, an associate professor at Boston College Law School also went on to say that Sotomayor had been the only justice to consistently bring in a real world experience of discrimination having experienced that discrimination herself.

During her tenure, she has continuously worked for the rights of defendants, calls for reform of the criminal justice system, and making impassioned dissents on issues of race, gender, and ethnic identity. She took pride in being a Latina in power when in 2001 she said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” 

With a high school in the Northside Independent School District named after her, the Supreme Court justice has influenced lives of many aspiring women, including Kamala Harris. She still continues to vouch for a radical change in the judicial system of the United States, a system that doesn’t discriminate between an American and non-American, races and religion.