Supreme Court police officers stand guard outside the court building in Washington, DC, June 2024.Mark Schiefelbein/AP
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One judge had to build a safe room at home. Others were so scared they wouldn’t let their children play outside; another stopped grocery shopping and couldn’t attend his grandchild’s recital because of a 24/7 security detail. “I can’t leave my house at the same time or take the same routes” every day, the one with the safe room said, fearing that someone might follow behind.
Threats to the federal judiciary have skyrocketed under the second Trump administration, according to a new report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which interviewed 35 sitting and retired federal judges, many of whom requested anonymity.
Many of the jurists said the job had become more dangerous partly because President Donald Trump and his allies verbally attack them for decisions on high-profile cases, leading to a surge in harassment from other people: After overseeing a contentious immigration case, the judge with the safe room got more than 700 threatening phone calls to their chambers. Others said they were “pizza-doxxed”—someone anonymously had pizzas delivered to their houses with threatening notes inside, including messages with the name Daniel Anderl, a 20-year-old who was murdered in 2000 by a gunman while his mom, Judge Esther Salas, served on the federal bench in New Jersey.
“We sign up for this. We are public servants,” one federal judge told the Brennan Center. “But our children don’t.”
“Threats to federal judges’ safety have always existed,” the Brennan Center authors wrote, “but their scope, frequency, and intensity have sharply increased over the past decade alongside the nation’s deepening political divisions.”
According to the US Marshals Services, the 2025 fiscal year saw a 57 percent uptick in “security incidents of significant concern” for federal judges, and the number was expected to keep rising. In July, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan reported that Supreme Court Police expected a 38 percent increase in threats to Supreme Court justices in 2026, after a 25 percent increase in 2025.
The annual average number of threats and hostile communications toward federal judges, prosecutors, judicial staff, and courts rose from 1,180 incidents in the decade before Trump’s first campaign to 3,810 in the seven years afterward, according to a Reuters report, with the number now at “unprecedented” levels. “In 40 years of judicial service,” US District Judge William G. Young told the Brennan Center, “I have never experienced an executive branch that is so overtly hostile to the federal judiciary—top to bottom.”
The Brennan Center report is striking for the sheer number of examples of harassment, and the candidness of judges who were interviewed. (Another report, also released on Monday by researchers at the law schools of University of California, Berkeley, and New York University, showed even more examples.) Some judges were victims of swatting—someone anonymously called the police to report a crisis at their home, triggering an armed response. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently recounted how her teenage son opened the door to discover police vehicles outside after someone falsely reported gunfire.
Others have received hate mail or faced intense online harassment: The judge with the safe room was inspired to build it because someone had posted their house’s floor plan on the internet. District Judge John Bates was threatened with an online image of a noose after Elon Musk posted photos of him and his wife. A May 2025 study found that online posts calling for violence or impeachment of judges increased 324 percent between May 2024 and March 2025.
Since Trump returned to office, more than 850 lawsuits have been filed to challenge the administration’s policies—and judges have at last partially blocked those policies in more than 150 cases, according to the Brennan Center. Judges said that for a while, cases involving the January 6 attack on the Capitol were the most likely to illicit threats, but lately immigration cases are the most dangerous. Many worried for their families. “We sign up for this. We are public servants,” Judge Beth Bloom of the Southern District of Florida, told the Brennan Center. “But our children don’t sign up for this.” Some judges wouldn’t let their kids go on social media, and others asked their loved ones to take different routes home.
Most of those interviewed said they needed more security. Some paid out of pocket for extra protection at home, and noted that security at courthouses had been underfunded. In 2021, the US Marshals Service, which protects federal judges, did “not have the resources or proactive threat detection capabilities” that it needed, according to an audit. Funding for federal court security stayed flat between the 2023 and 2025 fiscal years, but in February Congress increased it from $750 million to $892 million, the full amount requested by the judicial branch. “This was a positive and necessary development,” the Brennan Center wrote.
But other problems remain: The administration has reassigned some marshals from their judicial security jobs to immigration enforcement and other duties, and judges fear Trump will withdraw even more resources. Last week, my colleague Pema Levy reported that the Supreme Court is taking matters into its own hands and building up its own police force. The justices “keep ruling for Trump,” she wrote, “but don’t trust him to keep them safe.”
What will all of this do for judicial independence? Though judges told the Brennan Center that they would not be influenced in the courtroom by the growing threats outside it, some said it was hard to ignore the pressure, and they questioned how long they can keep living like this. Would they need to retire early?
“How many qualified great candidates are we losing because they are afraid to step into this arena?” said Judge Salas, whose son was killed by the gunman in 2020. Another judge added, “If this gets too bad, I’m going to stop.”
