In a rare appearance before Congress last Tuesday, Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett pressed lawmakers to approve $14.6 million in additional funding to expand personal security for all nine justices. The request would add six protective agents per justice, a response to what they described as an increasingly dangerous environment for the federal judiciary.
Justice Barrett told the panel that her current security detail consists of four to eight people who work around the clock. “When they drop me off at 11 at night, it’s the same team that has to come back in the morning,” she testified. Justice Kagan noted that when she joined the Court 16 years ago, she drove herself to work—a stark contrast to today’s reality.
The broader threat to federal judges is alarming. The U.S. Marshals Service maintains over 1,600 security systems in judges’ homes and has helped hundreds scrub their personal information from the internet. Yet only Supreme Court justices receive constant, round-the-clock protective details. Lower court judges—numbering nearly 890 nationwide—face a patchwork of security measures, and state court judges, estimated at 30,000, are even more vulnerable. The New York Times reported over 14,000 security incidents involving state courts in the last three years alone. In January, police arrested five people in connection with the shooting of an Indiana judge and his wife. In 2023, a Maryland judge was killed in his driveway; in 2022, a retired judge met the same fate in Wisconsin.
White House Rhetoric Fuels Concerns
While the justices focused on physical threats, the political atmosphere surrounding the judiciary has grown increasingly hostile. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told an audience in November 2025 that the Justice Department is “at war” with lower court judges who allegedly abuse power. His predecessor, Pam Bondi, threatened to prosecute “deranged” judges. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has decried a “judicial insurrection” and “indefensible judicial tyranny.” Vice President JD Vance pledged to “do battle” with “crazy far-left judges.”
President Trump has repeatedly attacked judges as “crooked,” “monsters,” and “lunatics,” accusing them of being “intimidated by the Radical Left.” He has even targeted individual Supreme Court justices who ruled against his interests. Yet the Court’s conservative majority has consistently sided with Trump in emergency requests, treating routine legal compliance as a crisis warranting immediate intervention.
In his first five months in office, Trump filed 19 emergency motions with the Supreme Court—more than double the total filed by the Obama and George W. Bush administrations over 16 years. He won the vast majority. The administration’s argument: being required to follow settled law, like every president before him, constitutes a five-alarm fire. The Court’s majority has accepted this premise, granting fast-tracked injunctions without full briefings, oral arguments, or detailed written opinions.
The Shadow Docket’s Dangerous Precedent
Historically, the emergency docket was reserved for genuine threats of irreparable harm, such as death row inmates facing imminent execution. Under Trump, it has been used to bypass lower court rulings on issues like due process for migrants. In one case, the administration sought emergency relief from a ruling requiring compliance with the Fifth Amendment before sending detainees to South Sudan, where they could face torture. In another, it challenged a ruling enforcing the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches during immigration raids in Los Angeles.
Justice Kagan acknowledged the “downsides of using emergency relief” during Tuesday’s hearing, but the broader impact on public trust went undiscussed. When the Supreme Court reflexively greenlights executive overreach as an “emergency,” it undermines the lower courts’ role in upholding the Constitution.
Congress should summon the justices again to explain what their oath of office means in this era of Trumpism. The judiciary’s independence depends on it.
