US judges who have increasingly rebuked the Trump administration’s harsh deportation agenda and other Maga policies are facing intense verbal assaults from the president and his allies, which seem to be spurring other dangerous threats against judges, say legal experts and former judges.
The Trump administration’s escalating fight with the courts has come as more than 200 lawsuits have challenged executive orders and policies on multiple issues including immigrant deportations, penalizing law firms with links to political foes, agency spending and workforce cuts, and other matters.
The wave of litigation has resulted in more than 100 executive orders by Trump and other initiatives being halted temporarily or paused by court rulings from judges appointed by both Democrats and Republicans including some by Trump.
Increasingly, ex-judges and legal experts warn the verbal attacks by Trump, his attorney general, Pam Bondi, and Maga allies are creating a hostile climate that endangers the safety of judges and their families.
“The constant mischaracterization by Trump and his allies of judicial rulings as political in nature, together with their false, vituperative and ad hominem attacks on individual judges who make them, skews the public’s perception of the work of the federal judiciary,” said ex-federal judge John Jones, who is now the president of Dickinson College.
Jones added: “These attacks foment a climate where the safety of judges and their families is at high risk.”
Those risks were underscored when the top Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, Richard Durbin, this month wrote to Bondi and the FBI director, Kash Patel, requesting an investigation into anonymous pizza deliveries to at least a dozen judges that seem aimed at intimidating them as they handle cases involving the administration.
Durbin’s letter noted some of the pizza deliveries were made in the name of US district judge Esther Salas’s son, Daniel Anderl, who was fatally shot in 2020 by a lawyer who pretended to be a delivery person, according to an April missive from Salas and attorney Paul Kiesel.
Elsewhere, Jones and more than two dozen other ex-judges issued a strong statement on Law Day this month announcing a new Article III Coalition linked to the non-partisan group Keep Our Republic to back judicial independence and warn of the dangers to judges posed by the Trump administration’s vitriolic attacks.
On a related track more than 150 ex-federal and state judges from both parties in early May signed a letter to Bondi and Patel denouncing the administration’s rising attacks on the judiciary and the unusual arrest of a Milwaukee judge charged with impeding federal agents from arresting an allegedly undocumented migrant in Wisconsin.
A federal grand jury on 13 May indicted the judge on charges of obstructing a proceeding and concealing a person from arrest.
“The circumstances of the arrest of the Milwaukee judge – her arrest, the perp walk, the picture of her handcuffs, the comments of the FBI director and the attorney general – was so far out of line with accepted practice and rules,” said Nancy Gertner, a former judge who now teaches at Harvard law school.
“It clearly was intended to intimidate other judges; there was no justification for it whatsoever,” added Gertner, who helped to coordinate the letter to Bondi and Patel with J Michael Luttig, a former assistant attorney general and ex-judge.
Gertner’s concerns were underscored when Bondi soon after the judge’s arrest threatened other judges who may balk at their legal agenda. “They’re deranged,” Bondi told Fox News. “ I think some of these judges think they are beyond and above the law, and they are not. We will come after you and we will prosecute you.”
Gertner stressed: “I’m hearing everywhere that judges are worried about their own safety. There are people who are inflamed by the incendiary comments of our president and members of Congress about judges. Public officials have legitimized attacks on judges with whom they disagree.”
Some Trump judicial appointees and other judges appointed by presidents of both parties have irked the administration with their rulings and incurred Trump’s wrath.
Trump in March urged the impeachment of the DC federal judge James Boasberg and falsely branded him a “radical left lunatic” after he issued a ruling to halt the deportation to El Salvador of scores of Venezuelan immigrants with alleged gang ties.
Although he didn’t mention Trump’s attack on Boasberg, Chief Justice John Roberts hours later criticized political attacks on the judiciaryand warned against calls to impeach judges for their decisions.
Roberts in a year-end report in December warned pointedly about threats aimed at judges, noting there had been a sizable rise in threats of violence, defiance of court rulings and disinformation.
In another legal dustup, in May the US district judge Beryl Howell issued a blistering decision that an executive order targeting the law firm Perkins Coie, which had represented Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, violated the first, fifth and sixth amendments.
Howell labeled the Trump order a “blunt exercise of power” that “is not a legitimate use of the powers of the US government or an American president”.
One Trump appointee, the Texas judge Fernando Rodriguez, this month echoed two other rulings to bar the Trump administration from using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act – which had only been used three times before – to deport alleged members of a Venezuelan gang, spurring a Trump attack on social media.
“Can it be so that Judges aren’t allowing the USA to Deport Criminals, including Murderers, out of our Country and back to where they came from? If this is so, our Country, as we know it, is finished!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
Despite the uptick in adverse rulings, the Trump administration is getting some court rulings backing at least part of its arguments.
A federal judge in Pennsylvania on 13 May ruled for the first time that Trump can use the Alien Enemies Act to accelerate deporting accused gang Venezuelan gang members, but stipulated significantly that targeted migrants have to be given at least three weeks’ notice and a chance to challenge their removals.
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Still, legal scholars and ex-judges warn the Trump administration has created a hostile climate with many judges by pushing factually and legally dubious cases, and trying to smear judges who ruled against them.
“Federal courts have always been ready to rebuke a justice department lawyer for concealing or misstating the facts or the law,” said Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor who is now a law professor at Columbia. “Now judges are increasingly presented with Trump administration emissaries who are poorly prepared to assist courts and who stand by when their leaders respond to adverse decisions by personally attacking judges. The credibility the government has with judges has long been a priceless asset. It’s disappearing fast.”
The former Republican congressman Charlie Dent from Pennsylvania said the Trump administration’s court setbacks were linked to their legally flawed cases.
“It appears the president is being beaten in court on a regular basis because many of his executive orders are legally and constitutionally questionable,” Dent said. “His lawyers are trying to argue weak cases and that’s why they’re losing.”
Dent added that Trump was “throwing mud against the wall to see what sticks. If it doesn’t stick he blames the courts.”
Gertner stressed: “Trump has pushed constitutional and statutory limits beyond recognition especially with regard to the Alien Enemies Act … Anyone on US soil has due process rights under the constitution, which means at the minimum a hearing.”
Some judges who have tangled with Trump and federal prosecutors over the administration’s radical deportation policies have been ensnared in extended court battles to get straight answers and facts from government lawyers.
Boasberg, who has been appointed at different times by presidents of both parties, opened a contempt hearing against the administration after it flouted an injunction to block Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport dozens of suspected Venezuelan gang members.
In response, the Trump administration invoked the State Secrets Act to block his inquiry into whether it defied a Boasberg order to turn around planes deporting Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador.
Another high-profile deportation ruling that angered the Trump administration and led to lengthy court battles involves a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to a dangerous prison in El Salvador which Ice has acknowledged was a mistake.
Despite court orders, including from the supreme court to “facilitate” the man’s return, the administration has failed to do so while offering dubious excuses.
The dangerous fallout from the administration’s flouting of court rulings and attacks on judges seems to have led to the anonymous pizza deliveries to the homes of judges.
Durbin’s letter to Bondi and Patel requested a full accounting of how many anonymous or pseudonymous pizza deliveries have been made to judges or their families since the Trump administration took office, the number of judges who have been affected and the districts or circuits where these judges are based.
The pizza deliveries started towards the end of February, as government lawyers sought to thwart rising legal challenges to Trump’s policies, and as Trump and Maga allies began frequent attacks against judges whose rulings they disdained.
The US Marshals Service, which provides security for federal judges and courthouses, has been investigating the deliveries, but it is unclear what role, if any, the justice department headquarters and the FBI have played to date.
Many of the pizzas were reportedly sent to the residences of judges presiding over cases the administration has been defending.
The Durbin letter to Bondi and Patel asked them to report by 20 May whether they had identified suspects, initiated prosecutions, or found evidence that the deliveries were coordinated, and describe what steps their agencies have taken to protect judges and their families.
To ex-judge Jones, the reports of pizza deliveries that seem aimed at scaring judges are “disgusting. They’re a direct result of the toxic comments about the federal judiciary by Trump and members of the executive branch and some DoJ officials including AG Pam Bondi.”
More broadly, some ex-prosecutors too voice alarms over the rising political attacks on judges. Ex-prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig blasted intimidation efforts against judges as “shameful expressions of authoritarian attacks on the rule of law”.