Sotomayor and Gorsuch Challenge Predatory Municipal Car Seizures

When a municipal government seizes and scraps a resident’s car over an unpaid debt, it cannot shield itself from the Constitution by calling the seizure an exercise of public safety. On Monday, October 19, 2026, the Supreme Court denied a petition for a writ of certiorari in O’Donnell v. City of Chicago, leaving intact an appellate decision that insulated the city’s punitive vehicle impoundment program from constitutional scrutiny. Yet in an uncommon cross-ideological statement respecting the denial, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, issued an unmistakable warning: labeling aggressive debt collection as the “police power” does not exempt cities from the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause.

The mechanism at issue is codified in the fine print of local law. Under the Chicago Municipal Code, motorists who accumulate as few as two unpaid parking or compliance tickets risk having their vehicles immobilized with a boot, towed to an impound lot, and ultimately destroyed or sold. The ordinance imposes no obligation on the city to compensate the owner, apply the auction proceeds toward the outstanding fine, or return surplus equity. As Justice Sotomayor observed, Chicago can simply “do as it pleases with the vehicle, with no obligation to pay compensation, offset the unpaid ticket debt, or return any surplus to the owner if the vehicle is sold for a profit.”

The human consequences of this statutory machinery are concrete. Petitioner Ryan O’Donnell accumulated $524 in penalties across three tickets: two for an expired meter and one for parking in a time-restricted zone. Chicago impounded his car, assessed administrative fees, and sold the vehicle for its scrap value of $273 to contractor United Road Towing, Inc. The city kept the proceeds, remitted nothing to O’Donnell, and wiped out none of his underlying debt. Petitioner Michael Goree faced an even more telling expropriation. Goree never incurred a single traffic infraction. Instead, Chicago seized his automobile because a cosigner on his auto loan owed roughly $560 for tickets incurred on an entirely different vehicle. Rather than returning the car, the city surrendered it to the lienholder, leaving Goree empty-handed.

To defend this regime, Chicago and its private contractor argued that the municipal code constitutes a standard exercise of regulatory authority necessary to compel compliance with local traffic rules. In December 2025, the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit accepted that defense in O’Donnell v. City of Chicago, ruling that because the confiscation enforced traffic laws, it fell under non-compensable police power rather than an eminent domain taking. Relying on decisions like the 1996 case Bennis v. Michigan, which permitted forfeiture of property directly used in criminal offenses, the appellate panel held that the city owed no compensation to owners whose cars were scrapped.

That reasoning stretches legal precedent past its breaking point. In Bennis, the seized vehicle was the physical instrumentality of an unlawful act. In Chicago, cars are impounded as leverage to recover money, and in Goree’s case, the seized vehicle had no connection to any offense. As Sotomayor and Gorsuch pointed out, these operational mechanics “strongly suggest that ‘the purpose of vehicle impoundments’ under Chicago’s scheme ‘is to collect a debt, not enforce public safety laws.’” If the city is operating as a debt collector, the governing standard is the high court’s unanimous 2023 ruling in Tyler v. Hennepin County. In Tyler, the Supreme Court affirmed that the government cannot take more from a debtor than what is owed. Retaining surplus property value beyond the underlying liability violates the Takings Clause.

Chicago’s resistance to that standard reflects an institutional reliance on fine-based budgeting. In 2016, traffic ticketing and vehicle impoundment generated $264 million for the city, accounting for approximately 7 percent of its total operating budget. As documented in a 2018 investigation by ProPublica, this revenue model functions as a regressive tax, systematically extracting wealth from Black and working-class residents. For thousands of families, the seizure of a vehicle is an economic catastrophe. Without a car, workers lose access to employment, child care, and health care, making it impossible to satisfy the municipal debt that triggered the seizure. Tens of thousands of Chicago drivers have been forced into Chapter 13 bankruptcy simply to protect or recover their vehicles.

The Seventh Circuit’s decision exposed an entrenched split across the federal judiciary. Circuit courts have increasingly weaponized the term “police power” to carve out categorical immunities against property claims. In decisions such as the Federal Circuit’s 2008 ruling in AmeriSource Corp. v. United States and the Tenth Circuit’s 2019 decision in Lech v. Jackson, judges granted absolute immunity when law enforcement damaged or destroyed private property. Sotomayor and Gorsuch previously flagged that dangerous insulation in 2024 in Baker v. City of McKinney. By categorizing administrative fee extraction alongside public safety measures, the Seventh Circuit extended that shield from emergency situations to routine municipal revenue enforcement.

A coherent constitutional alternative exists. Municipalities can enforce parking rules through proportional monetary sanctions and civil collection mechanisms that include basic procedural safeguards, debt reconciliation, and the mandatory return of surplus equity. What they cannot do is transform bureaucratic enforcement into an uncompensated forfeiture system that strips residents of essential assets while leaving the underlying debts intact. While procedural defects spared Chicago’s impound lots on Monday, the joint statement from Sotomayor and Gorsuch is an open invitation for future challenges. The high court will not permit cities to balance their budgets through unconstitutional confiscation forever.