Threats Rise Against Judges Overseeing Trump Policy Cases, Fueling Safety Concerns

President Trump’s angry call on Tuesday for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against his administration on deportation flights has set off a string of near-instant social media taunts and threats, including images of judges being marched off in handcuffs.

The call came against an ominous backdrop. Nine days earlier, police officers in Charleston, S.C., had been dispatched to the home of one of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s sisters because of a threat that there was a pipe bomb in her mailbox. “The device’s detonation will be triggered as soon as the mailbox is next opened,” the emailed threat read.

The pipe bomb proved to be a hoax, but the threats and intimidation faced by judges and their families in recent weeks are real, judges say. At a moment when the judiciary is weighing pivotal decisions on the legality of Trump administration policies, the potential for violence against judges seems to be rising.

“I feel like people are playing Russian roulette with our lives,” said Judge Esther Salas of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, whose 20-year-old son was shot and killed at her home in 2020 by a self-described “anti-feminist” lawyer.

“This is not hyperbole,” she added. “I am begging our leaders to realize that there are lives at stake.”

The threats and intimidation may have not become actual violence, but they appear to be mounting, as Mr. Trump, his advisers and his supporters are questioning almost daily the legitimacy of the American legal system. There is no evidence that jurists’ judgment in the high-profile cases before them has been warped by their antagonists. But at the least, public perceptions of judicial decisions could be shaped by the volume of attacks on the courts.

The attempts at intimidation have taken many forms: bomb threats, anonymous calls to dispatch police SWAT teams to home addresses, even the delivery of pizzas, a seemingly innocuous prank but one that carries a message.

“They know where you and your family members live,” said one judge who is overseeing litigation against the Trump administration and has received a pizza delivery. The judge requested anonymity, citing concerns for their own security and that of their family.

On the day that police responded to Justice Barrett’s sister home, the U.S. Marshals Service in the Southern District of New York issued a bulletin: Federal judges were being targeted with anonymous Domino’s deliveries. Police say members of Justice Barrett’s immediate family were among those who received pizza deliveries.

“This emerging form of harassment has been seen in several districts throughout the country,” the bulletin read.

Judges nominated by presidents of both parties have been targets, but a pattern is emerging: Many of the threats are aimed at jurists who are hearing lawsuits against the Trump administration.

“We assess that these incidents are related to high-profile cases that have received extensive media coverage and public interest,” the Marshals Service wrote of the pizza deliveries.

After Judge John C. Coughenour of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington issued his first order blocking the Trump administration’s attempt to abolish birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of noncitizens, he said in an interview that he had been the target of a “swatting” attack, in which a false tip sent sheriff’s deputies to his home expecting to find an armed intruder. That was followed by a mailbox bomb threat sent to the F.B.I. that proved to be a hoax.

After a federal judge in Rhode Island, John J. McConnell Jr., blocked an attempt by the Trump administration to freeze as much as $3 trillion in federal funding to the states, his courthouse received a large volume of phone messages and emails, some of which were referred to the Marshals Service for review, according to Frank Perry, a court spokesman.

Threats against judges and justices are not new. In June 2022, an armed man, Nicholas John Roske, was arrested near the home of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, and told the police that he had traveled there from California to kill the justice, according to federal officials. His trial is set for June.

Even so, members of the federal judiciary are raising alarms that the dangers appear to be escalating, both online and in the real world.

Two federal appellate judges, Jeffrey S. Sutton and Richard J. Sullivan, both Republican appointees, raised concerns about the safety of judges earlier this month after a meeting of the Judicial Conference, the national policy-making body for the federal judiciary.

“Criticism is no surprise; it’s part of the job,” said Judge Sutton, who is the chief judge of the Sixth Circuit. “But I do think, when it gets to the level of a threat, it really is about attacking judicial independence.”

In his social media post on Tuesday, Mr. Trump did not just demand that District Judge James Boasberg be impeached; he also called the judge, who issued an order temporarily blocking the administration’s plan to deport Venezuelan immigrants, a “Radical Left Lunatic, a troublemaker and agitator.”

The post prompted Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to rebuke Mr. Trump in a rare public statement. “Impeachment,” he wrote, “is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”

But by then, Mr. Trump’s followers had already followed his lead. Pseudonymous social media accounts called judges who ruled against the president “traitors” and “lawless.” One post called Judge Boasberg a “terrorist-loving judge.” Another suggested that he be sent “to GITMO for 20 years.”

Laura Loomer, a close ally of Mr. Trump, trained the attention of her 1.5 million online followers on Judge Boasberg’s daughter.

“His family is a national security threat,” she wrote.

That post echoed an earlier instance when Elon Musk, the billionaire adviser to Mr. Trump and owner of the social media site X, reposted what Ms. Loomer claimed was personal information that she had gleaned from the LinkedIn page of Judge McConnell’s daughter.

Judge James C. Ho, a conservative appellate judge who was named to the bench by Mr. Trump, said he was not convinced that there had been any uptick in threats, and suggested that the alarms being raised now about the threats may be driven by partisanship.

“Judges have faced hateful attacks, and worse, for years,” Judge Ho said, pointing to threats against two conservative federal judges, Matthew Kacsmaryk in Texas and Aileen Cannon in Florida. “Defending judicial independence only when you like the results is not protecting the judiciary. It’s politicizing the judiciary.”

Data collected by the Marshals Service, which provides protection for judges, show that the number of investigated threats against federal judges, prosecutors, court officials and members of the public who visit or work in federal courthouses had declined over the last two years, to 822 in 2024 from 1,362 in 2022. The Marshals Service did not respond to a request for threat statistics for the first months of 2025.

In his year-end report on the federal judiciary, Chief Justice Roberts issued an unusually somber and urgent warning of “a significant uptick” in threats. He said Marshals Service data, showed that hostile threats and communications directed at judges had more than tripled over the previous decade.

“The judges that I talk to are worried,” said Gabe Roth of Fix the Court, a nonprofit advocacy group. “More so than they were four, or eight, or 12 years ago.”

Court watchers say that singling out individual judges who rule against the administration poses a unique danger, both for the judges themselves and for a judicial system that relies on their fearless impartiality.

“It doesn’t take a mob storming the courthouse,” said Jeremy Fogel, a retired federal judge and ethics expert who directs the Berkeley Judicial Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “It just takes one person who decides to go after a judge.”

If nothing else, threats to impeach judges over their rulings suggest that it is permissible to disregard judicial orders and sidestep the regular appeals process, according to Judge Marjorie Rendell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

“We don’t have the power of the sword, or the purse,” she said of the judicial system. “We depend on respect. And the minute you start undermining that respect? Who knows where that might lead.”

Judge Coughenour, who was threatened during the 1999 trial of the Montana Freemen militia and again during the 2001 trial of an Al Qaeda terrorist, said he had taken the new threats against his life in stride.

“I’ve been at this so long, that stuff kind of rolls off my back,” he said in an interview.

But threats from Congress to impeach him over his rulings? Those are “something I’ve never seen before,” Judge Coughenour said.

A Supreme Court spokeswoman said the court did not comment on security matters. Justice Barrett did not respond to a request for comment. Law enforcement officials in Louisiana confirmed that they had received incident calls for the home addresses of the justice’s parents and another of her sisters, and had referred the matters to federal law enforcement.

Julie Tate contributed research. Audio produced by Parin Behrooz