Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito surprised the court Thursday by publicly rebuking fellow Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

The rebuke happened after the court ruled in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado by decreeing that a migrant seeking asylum in the United States isn’t entitled to have their case heard if they apply from Mexico, according to SCOTUSblog.

BREAKING: Supreme Court rules for Trump on border turnback policy, holding that a migrant stopped on the Mexican side of the border does not arrive in the US under INA provisions governing asylum pic.twitter.com/pQstRH14Q3

— Kelsey Reichmann (@KelseyReichmann) June 25, 2026

Sotomayor dissented in the case, which was fine. But following the majority decision, she strangely enough decided to publicly read some of her dissent to the high court, which critics said was uncommon.

In her dissent, she accused the Trump administration of creating a roadmap that’ll allow this administration and future administrations to bypass asylum laws by simply preventing migrants from entering the U.S.

“The consequences of today’s decision are predictable,” she said. “More people will die.”

Sotomayor also invoked the MS St. Louis, a ship that left Nazi Germany in 1939 carrying Jewish refugees but was turned away by the U.S. government. The ship had to return to Europe, where most of the refugees were killed.

“If the refugees on the MS St. Louis were to walk up to a port of entry on our southern border today, the majority’s interpretation would allow immigration officers to refuse even to consider their asylum applications by physically blocking them from stepping foot onto U.S. soil,” Sotomayor said.

Alito wasn’t impressed.

“As Sotomayor goes on for 10 minutes, longer than the total of Alito’s first two opinion summaries, he at times leans back in his chair and sips from his water cup,” SCOTUSblog noted. “When she wraps up, he leans forward and we expect him to move on to his third opinion. But first, he has a response.”

It’s at this point that he rebuked Sotomayor.

In a highly unusual moment at the Supreme Court, Justice Alito gave an impromptu response to Justice Sotomayor from the bench after she read her dissent from his majority opinion in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado.

— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) June 25, 2026

“There is much that I would have added to my bench statement had I known there would be a dissent read,” Alito said before expounding on how Sotomayor’s dissent was fundamentally wrong.

“The government’s policy merely delayed entry by some aliens as a way of improving a situation that both interfered with the proper conduct of inspection and created unsanitary, inhumane, and sometimes dangerous conditions at ports of entry,” he said.

His decision to pipe up sent shockwaves through the left, which is accustomed to seeing its heroes — including the likes of Sotomayor — worshipped like gods.

According to MS NOW legal analyst Lisa Rubin, “people in the Supreme Court, in the gallery gasped when he said that because this is a group of people that, for all of their differences in terms of legal, interpretive methodology or even the outcome of cases, they like to make it seem as if they get along; that they are all just rowing in the same direction, trying to do their job to uphold the rule of law, even when their conceptions of what the rule of law… differs.”

“That very obvious public fracture between the two of them was one that was surprising even to the most veteran court watchers in the room today,” she added, as reported by The Daily Beast.

Today’s Supreme Court decisions on the Trump administration’s immigration policies exposed the deep rifts on the Court. CNN’s Joan Biskupic was in the chamber and reports on the palpable tension between Justice Alito and Justice Sotomayor. pic.twitter.com/fZyaXcIwRS

— Inside Politics (@InsidePolitics) June 25, 2026

CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst Joan Biskupic was angered even more by Alito’s brief statement, calling it a “very bitter response.”

“What happened in the courtroom showed not just the division but the anger between the two sides,” she reportedly told CNN host Wolf Blitzer.

She also accused Alito of having “anger dripping from his voice.”