A wedding in Cabo and a reservation at a posh airport suite are highlights

Fix the Court this week received a third batch of documents from the State Department concerning Supreme Court justices’ international travel from 2018 to 2024, for which the Department’s Diplomatic Security Services arranged protection.

The documents are being produced as a result of a FOIA lawsuit FTC filed in Mar. 2025. We previously received documents in March and April and expect more later in the summer.

Of the 11 justice-trips in this batch (nine with one justice and one with two justices), five were repeats from a prior one: Roberts and Barrett in Ireland in 2023 for the Notre Dame-Navy football game; Gorsuch in Mexico (2021) and Slovenia (2022) for vacation; and Barrett in Italy in 2022 for an American College of Trial Lawyers conference.

Six trips were new: Sotomayor twice in the U.K. (2022, in her disclosure, and 2024, oddly not in her disclosure); Kagan in Mexico (2023); Kavanaugh in Italy (2022); Ginsburg in Portugal (2019); and Breyer in the U.K. (2023). The Sotomayor, Kavanaugh and Ginsburg trips were official visits; the Kagan and Breyer trips were vacation.

Kagan in Mexico:
According to the documents, Justice Kagan was scheduled to fly to Cabo San Lucas on Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula on Apr. 1, 2023, and return the next day or the day after (p. 65).

A Supreme Court spokesperson confirmed Kagan’s attendance and that the justice “paid her own expenses” but declined to note whose wedding it was.

Sotomayor in the U.K.:
Justice Sotomayor was at an NYU-sponsored conference in Scotland in 2022 and was flying home through London when several travel mishaps occurred (pp. 30-48). First, her connection from Edinburgh to Heathrow was canceled, so she got a train ticket. Then there was a rail strike, so she planned to drive down but at the last minute was able to arrange a flight.

What’s strange about the trip is that Supreme Court officials appear to have approved up to $6,500 for her and her party to spend time in the VIP Windsor Suite at Heathrow Airport between connections to and from Edinburgh (p. 35). That’s a major expense for such a short window of time, as it appears from the documents that she only had a 95-minute layover on the way there and a 65-minute layover on the way back.

Though Sotomayor stated in her 2022 disclosure, “In conjunction with my participation in the identified event, I extended my stay at my own expense for a private vacation in Scotland,” it’s unclear if the “own expense” included the Windsor Suite.

Barrett in Italy:
Ahead of Justice Barrett’s 2022 Italy trip, internal communications show a thorough and well-coordinated security plan between her SCOTUS security team and the Regional Security Office in Rome. This included an in-person meeting at the Tri-Mission Rome compound ahead of Barrett’s arrival to “talk all of [the security logistics] through and prep.”

Funding concerns:
An interesting dynamic emerged in the communications between SCOTUS and State Department officials about payment logistics for security during the justices’ trips.

Specifically, a DSS official responding to Justice Kavanaugh’s security detail urged the SCOTUS team to “communicate to your finance team that it is imperative to send funding as soon as possible” as the timing of the payments was “becom[ing] an issue.”

The official explained that receiving payment a few days prior to a justice’s visit is “not good practice” because it can result in voided car contracts and the inability to hold other reservations. This obstacle appears to be the result of the embassies and SCOTUS using different payment and reimbursement systems, making fund sharing between the two more challenging.

Additional information:
As noted in prior releases, FTC in Nov. 2024 requested documents concerning the services the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security provided to the justices when they traveled internationally between Jan. 1, 2018, to Nov. 27, 2024. After not receiving the documents, we sued.

The FOIA request has two purposes: first, to identify any travel or other perks the justices may have omitted from their disclosures, whether because they were trying to hide them or because disclosure wasn’t required; and second, to ensure the nine are well-covered by security services when they leave the U.S.