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WASHINGTON – Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., reading for the majority Tuesday morning, spoke clinically. Judge Stephen G. Breyer followed, poking his way through his dissent with gentleness and analysis.
Then it was Judge Sonia Sotomayor's turn.
Steely and unshakeable, she began: "The United States of America is a nation built on the promise of religious freedom.Our founders honored this fundamental promise by incorporating the principle of religious neutrality into the First Amendment. "
The overcrowded courthouse was silent.
By upholding President Trump's ban on traveling to several predominantly Muslim countries, Justice Sotomayor continued, the Supreme Court has failed to "safeguard this fundamental principle".
For the next 20 minutes, she remained resolute while she was expressing an extraordinarily burning dissent, skewing the court's decision and condemning the ban as "heartbreaking" and "motivated by hostility." and animosity towards the Muslim faith ".
The remarkable dissent was delivered by a woman who defended her own education as an example of the American dream. Justice Sotomayor, whose parents moved from Puerto Rico during the Second World War, was raised in a housing project in the Bronx. His father did not speak English and his first language was Spanish. But determined to become a judge, she will go to Princeton University and become the first Latina justice of the Supreme Court.
Judge Sotomayor said that "personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see". She again took advantage of this idea in her dissent on Tuesday, in which she accused the majority of ignoring the facts, interpreting our previous legal eye to the pain and suffering that the proclamation inflicts on countless families and individuals, many of whom are US citizens. "
Such was the overwhelming conclusion of Judge Sotomayor: the prohibition of the President is "inexplicable by anything but animus", and to pretend that anything else amounts to separating from the facts.
The court voted 5 to 4, with the most conservative judges in the majority and with Judge Breyer writing his own dissent. Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg joins Judge Sotomayor.
Judge Sotomayor chose his words carefully and sharply, accusing at one point that Mr. Trump's policy "is now hiding behind a facade of national security concerns."
But one of his most striking decisions was to repeat the words of the president himself. Citing more than a dozen cases in which Mr. Trump tweeted or emitted anti-Muslim sentiments, it was his words, not his own, that sounded from the bench.
She continued on the list for minutes, reading one example after the other.
"On December 21, 2016, President-elect Trump was asked where he would" rethink "his" previous plans to create a Muslim registry or to ban Muslim immigration, "Sotomayor J. said. He replied, "You know my plans, all along, I've proven to be right."
"People, lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I call it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL PROHIBITED! # 39; " Has she read, telling the story of the president. Tweet 2017.
"Islam hates us," she read, citing another example, and added another: "We have problems with Muslims coming into the country."
The Conservative judges, who stared straight ahead, remained frozen.
She added that Mr. Trump had never disavowed any of his statements concerning Islam and that he had therefore not "corrected the reasonable perception of his apparent hostility to the fact. with regard to the Islamic faith ".
In another powerful passage, Judge Sotomayor drew parallels between the decision and the Korematsu case. United States, the 1944 decision that confirmed the detention of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.
"Like here, the government has invoked an ill-defined national security threat to justify a far-reaching policy of exclusion," she said. "Like here, the exclusion was rooted in dangerous stereotypes regarding, among other things, the supposed inability of a particular group to assimilate and want to harm the United States."
Judge Sotomayor went on to say that "our nation has done a lot to let its sordid heritage be behind" in the years that followed Korematsu. But, she explained, "it does not make the decision of the majority acceptable or fair".
"By blindly accepting the government's unwelcome invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity towards a disadvantaged group, all in the name of a superficial demand for national security," she said, "The court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu – a decision" seriously wrong "with another."
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