U.S. Circuit Court Judge J. Michelle Childs has received seven free pizza deliveries since February at her Washington, D.C., home. She believes it’s no coincidence that, during that time, she was presiding over a case involving President Donald 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,” said 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.”
Childs and her husband no longer answer their door without looking at visitors through a doorbell security camera.
The targeting has taken a cruel turn with one judge in particular. 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 her son’s name in the years since his death.
“To have his name weaponized as a vehicle of fear and intimidation, that takes quite a toll,” she told The Washington Post, which reports there have been hundreds of such threats this year against judges nationwide.
“It went from judges getting pizzas, to then judges’ children getting pizzas, to then judges getting pizzas or their children getting pizzas that they didn’t order in my murdered son’s name,” Salas told The Post.
Trump has issued 147 executive orders since returning to office, part of a conservative overhaul of the government on issues including immigration, the economy and transgender rights. Those orders are part of the implementation of a dramatic conservative agenda.
Legal challenges that have followed have been framed as obstructionist by Trump and his minions. Conservatives have targeted the judges hearing these cases, and the pizza deliveries are taken as a chilling message.
“They know where you and your family members live,” one anonymous judge told The New York Times after receiving an unsolicited pizza delivery in March.
Some judges have faced even more intrusive harassment. 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 outside the judge’s home.
Police responded by sending a swarm of officers to the judge’s home for what amounted to a false alarm.
“These incidents threaten not only judges and their families, but also judicial independence and the rule of law,” Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin wrote in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.
In his letter, Durbin noted that more than 5,000 U.S. marshals, tasked with protecting federal judges, were offered the chance to resign as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s cost-cutting measures.
“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.
Abigail Jo Shry, a 44-year-old MAGA supporter, is facing prison time after pleading guilty to threatening U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who oversaw Trump’s Capitol riot case. Shry, who has a history of arrests and struggles with alcohol and mental health issues, left a racist voicemail laced with violent threats against Chutkan, Democrats, the LGBTQ community, and the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. Authorities tracked her down in Texas after the call, which she admitted making but claimed was protected by the First Amendment.
Meanwhile, Trump and his associates continue to demonize federal judges who rule against his administration.
Elon Musk has equated federal judges to “gavel-wielding dictators,” while the president attacked a judge reviewing his emergency deportation flights to El Salvador as a “radical left lunatic.”
Earlier this month, more than 150 retired state and federal judges criticized the administration’s repeated attacks on the judiciary, calling them an attempt to undermine the rule of law, after the arrest of Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan, 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.
