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Pipe bomb threats. Creepy unwanted pizza deliveries. Threatening messages.
These are some of the threats federal judges have been facing in recent weeks, adding to an already tense atmosphere in which Donald Trump and his allies continue to lash out at officials who have ruled against parts of the president’s agenda.
“I feel like people are playing Russian roulette with our lives,” federal Judge Esther Salas said in an interview with The New York Times.. Her 20-year-old son was shot and killed at her home in 2020 by a disgruntled lawyer.
“This is not hyperbole,” she told the newspaper. “I am begging our leaders to realize that there are lives at stake.”
The threats have impacted judges and their families from across the political spectrum.
Earlier this month, an anonymous individual claimed they had placed a pipe bomb at the Charleston, South Carolina, home of Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Family members have also been the targets of unwanted pizza deliveries, gestures law enforcement believes are meant to be warnings.
An anonymous federal judge, overseeing litigation against the Trump administration, told the Times they had received one such alarming delivery.
“They know where you and your family members live,” the judge said of the chilling message such a delivery sends.
Another federal judge, John C. Coughenhour, who issued an order blocking the administration’s attempts to unilaterally end birthright citizenship, was the victim of a so-called “SWATing” attack, in which an anonymous tipster called in a phony threat about an armed man, sending a mass of police officers to the judge’s home.
Meanwhile, judges Paul Engelmayer and Jeannette Vargas, who are overseeing lawsuits against Elon Musk’s DOGE program, have been assigned extra security.
While federal judges have long faced violent threats — for instance, in 2022, when an armed man broke into the home of Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh — some observers say the present political climate, with Trump, Musk, and their allies repeatedly attacking all federal judges who rule against them as corrupt, has made the situation worse.
“I’ve never seen judges as uneasy as they are now,” former Pennsylvania federal just John Jones II told Reuters.
Musk has been loudly supportive of calls to impeach U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ordered the Trump administration to turn around a group of recent deportation flights to El Salvador amid a challenge to the White House’s invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act for rapid deportations — a court order the administration ignored. (The government has argued it was authorized to continue the flights because an initial warning was given as a verbal order, and the planes were in international airspace.)
In recent days, Musk has donated thousands of dollars to GOP members of Congress pushing for Boasberg’s impeachment. He has also reshared a post from conservative activist Charlie Kirk calling federal judges like Boasberg “gavel-wielding dictators.” In addition, the unelected White House adviser has called on wants Congress to impeach the judges and “restore rule of the people.”
Trump, for his part, has blasted Boasberg as a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator” and claimed the judge is trying to seize presidential powers in the deportations case.
The administration’s repeated demonization of Boasberg, as well as its attempt to remove him from the case and calls for impeachment prompted a rare public rebuke from Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts.
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose,” he said earlier this week.
Despite these attacks, the White House says it condemns threats against judges.
“The White House condemns any threats to really any public officials, despite our feelings that a lot of these people are leftist, crazy judges that aren’t following the Constitution,” a spokesperson said earlier this month. “Just because these people are leftist, crazy, unconstitutional people doesn’t mean they deserve to be harmed. That’s not how you engage with disputes in this country.”
The Trump administration has sought to undermine judiciary influence in other ways, including firing Justice Department officials who worked on past investigations of the president, and stripping security privileges from law firms that the president deems his political enemies.
