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Federal judges across the country, some of them presiding over cases involving the Trump administration, have been receiving unsolicited orders of pizza to their homes, in what they see as a tactic meant to intimidate them.
U.S. Circuit Judge J. Michelle Childs, who serves in Washington, D.C., told The Washington Post she got her first of seven pizza deliveries this year in February as she worked on a case involving Trump’s attempt to fire the head of an agency protecting whistleblowers.
“It’s unsettling because I’d like to go to work every day, even with the hardest case, just feeling like there’s no sense of intimidation,” Childs, president of the Federal Judges Association. “It’s really an unnecessary and an unfortunate threat to our security when we’re trying to be judicial officers in a very neutral position with respect to our cases,” she added.
She and her husband now do not answer the door directly for deliveries, instead looking at visitors through a doorbell security camera.
U.S. District Judge Ester Salas, whose son Daniel Anderl was fatally shot in 2020 by an attorney posing as a delivery worker, said she’s heard from judges in D.C. and seven other states who have been sent pizzas under Daniel’s name in the years since.
“To have his name weaponized as a vehicle of fear and intimidation, that takes quite a toll,” she told the Post.
The outlet estimates that there may have been hundreds of such threats this year against judges.
An anonymous federal judge, overseeing litigation against the Trump administration, told the New YorkTimes in March 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.
Last week, Senator Dick Durbin called on federal officials to investigate the anonymous deliveries to judges.
“These incidents threaten not only judges and their families, but also judicial independence and the rule of law,” he wrote in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.
In the letter, Durbin also spoke out against reports from April that the U.S. Marshals, who are tasked with protecting federal judges, offered more than 5,000 employees the chance to resign as part of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency’s cost-cutting efforts.
“In the midst of increasing threats of violence against judges, it is inappropriate and unacceptable to reduce the size of the agency tasked with protecting the federal judiciary and the judicial process,” Durbin said.
Observers have expressed dismay over the Trump administration’s pattern of demonizing federal judges who rule against it.
Musk has compared judges to “gavel-wielding dictators,” while the president attacked a judge scrutinizing his emergency deportation flights to El Salvador as a “Radical Left Lunatic.”
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts made a rare public state in March, pushing back after the Trump administration tried to remove the judge in the El Salvador case, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg.
"For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts wrote. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
This month, more than 150 retired state and federal judges criticized the Trump administration’s repeated attacks on the judiciary, calling them an attempt to undermine the rule of law.
The judges took issue with how the administration handled the April arrest of Hannah Dugan, a Wisconsin judge accused of attempting to prevent federal agents from arresting an undocumented man outside her courtroom.
FBI agents arrested Dugan, with FBI Director Kash Patel sharing a photo of her perp walk, while Bondi accused Dugan and other judges of being “deranged” soon after.
“This latest action is yet another attempt to intimidate and threaten the judiciary after a series of rulings by judges appointed by presidents of both parties holding the Trump Administration accountable for its countless violations of the Constitution and laws of the United States,” the judges wrote in their letter.
Threats against judges predate the second Trump administration, too.
Chief Justice Roberts noted “a significant uptick in identified threats at all levels of the judiciary” in his end-of-year-report for 2024, while an armed man broke into the home of Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022.
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