WASHINGTON – Federal judges rarely speak publicly about the work they do, but in two separate reports released this week, dozens offer a rare and grim look inside the unprecedented surge in violent threats they’re facing as they try to do their jobs.
Researchers for both of these reports — one from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, the other a joint project of NYU’s Rule of Law Lab and the Berkeley Judicial Institute — interviewed sitting and retired judges from around the country, appointed by presidents from both parties, to gauge the kinds of threats they’re facing, to see why they think this is happening and to assess the damage this may be doing to the independence of the courts.
Across the board, these judges, most of whom spoke anonymously out of fear for their and their families’ safety, describe a spike in disturbing phone calls, emails and death threats. Some have urged loved ones to take different routes home, and barred their children from playing outside. Some were advised to buy a firearm for protection.
One judge was so worried for their family’s safety after being the target of intense threats — more than 700 received — that they built a safe room in their house after someone posted the floor plans to their home on the internet. Others reported being “swatted,” which is when a bad actor falsely reports a crime to draw a law enforcement response to someone’s home, and of being “doxxed,” when a bad actor publicizes someone’s home address as a threat to show they know where they live.
While there’s always been tension between free speech and an independent judiciary, what’s new, these judges say, is the volume and severity of the attacks they face. There’s been an uptick in threats against judges over the past decade, but both reports found that the latest surge began in early 2025, when President Donald Trump resumed office.
Over the last year and a half, as threats have soared, Trump and his allies have repeatedly singled out judges for attacks and threats of impeachment against “rogue judges” when they’ve issued decisions Trump doesn’t like. Their attacks spread on social media and lead to private actors sometimes taking matters into their own hands. Judges who gave interviews for these reports cited contentious cases involving the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and legal challenges to the administration’s policies, as triggering a deluge of threats.
Amrit Singh, the lead author of the Rule of Law Lab’s report on judicial attacks, was reluctant to pin most of the blame on Trump for the rise in threats, instead saying public officials in general have fueled this crisis with their rhetorical attacks on judges. She emphasized that her report is nonpartisan and called it the first academic study of its kind, drawing exclusively on interviews with 34 judges and publicly available research data.
She couldn’t dispute the correlation between the spike in threats and Trump’s return to office, though.
“The facts speak for themselves,” she told HuffPost. “This is an academic study, and I can talk to you about what the evidence shows.”
Singh, who is also a professor at NYU and the founding director of NYU Law’s Rule of Law Lab, warned that threats to judges are “causing real harm to real people,” and noted that judges appointed by presidents of both major parties are reporting a new type of intimidation known as “pizza doxxing,” or the anonymous delivery of unsolicited pizzas to their homes.
Her report offers recommendations to help ensure judges’ safety, one of which notes that the U.S. Marshals Service, the agency responsible for federal judicial security, is understaffed and underfunded. Her study also uncovered that, for some reason, even though it’s illegal to threaten federal judges, cases of doxxing and swatting are rarely prosecuted.
This is a particularly disturbing finding for U.S. District Judge Esther Salas. Her son Daniel was murdered in 2020 by a disgruntled lawyer who had previously appeared before her in court, and she’s since spoken out about the need for people to ratchet down the attacks on judges.
Salas, who serves on a New Jersey court, told HuffPost that as of February 2026, there have been at least 200 pizza doxxing incidents targeting judges, and at least 20 of those cases involved perpetrators using her son’s name as the person delivering the pizza.
“I fear we are normalizing this kind of irresponsible, dangerous rhetoric,” she said. “I fear the rippling effects this is gonna have on the judiciary and on democracy moving forward. We’re either normalizing it or we’re desensitized to it, because they’re flooding the zone.”
The Brennan Center’s report similarly found judges saying their jobs have never felt so dangerous, and that they worry about both their families’ safety and the willingness of future judges to accept the risks of the job.
“In 40 years of judicial service, I have never experienced an executive branch that is so overtly hostile to the federal judiciary — top to bottom,” Judge William G. Young, a senior U.S. district judge in Massachusetts appointed by President Ronald Reagan, says in the report.
“Never have I experienced or seen anything like this — never — including [from] this president’s prior administration,” Young said.
Other judges raised concerns about inadequate courthouse security and the executive branch interfering with the mission of the U.S. Marshals. One judge noted that marshals once assigned to their courthouse had been redeployed to immigration enforcement.
Stephen Spaulding, managing director of the Brennan Center’s Kohlberg Center on the Supreme Court and a co-author on the group’s new report, said one of the first steps Congress could take is working with the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to set up a commission to evaluate the best ways to bolster security across the federal judiciary.
That was one of the suggestions Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan made in July, when they testified to a Senate committee about their budget needs, which included a request for increased security funding.
Barrett, too, was the target of a pizza-doxxing incident in March, right after she and Chief Justice John Roberts joined a decision against the Trump administration. Barrett’s sister was also the target of a bomb threat, and in a May incident, Barrett was swatted at her home. Her teenage son opened the door to find police cars everywhere, responding to a fake report of gunfire at their home.
Supreme Court justices have had around-the-clock security since at least 2022, but that’s not the case for hundreds of U.S. district and appeals court judges.
“The Supreme Court has its own police. Lower court federal judges do not have a similar security apparatus,” said Spaulding. “We do think there’s grounds to evaluate whether that needs to change … It’s urgent and necessary.”