Opinion: But who will protect the judges from Trump?

In rare public testimony, two Supreme Court Justices, Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett, appeared before Congress last Tuesday to make a case for $14.6 million in increased funding to cover six additional personal security agents for each of the nine justices.

Justice Barrett testified that she currently has “a detail of four to eight people and when they have to monitor you around the clock, when they drop me off at 11 at night, and then it’s the same team that has to come back in the morning.” According to Justice Kagan, when she joined the court just 16 years ago, she drove herself to work.

The rising threats to federal judges, which at full capacity number 890 nationwide, should disturb every American. To some degree, they come from “litigants angered by judges’ decisions in cases,” such as in the 2020 killing of the son of Federal District Court Judge Ester Salas at her family’s home in New Jersey.

The country’s estimated 30,000 state court judges are even more exposed. The New York Times identified more than 14,000 security incidents involving state courts and their employees over the past three years alone. No coherent security force even tracks threats against state court judges. In January, police arrested five people in connection with the shootings 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 at his home in Wisconsin.

The U.S. Marshals Service maintains over 1,600 security systems in federal judges’ personal residences and has helped hundreds remove their personally identifiable information from the internet. But only Supreme Court justices receive consistent, round-the-clock, personal protective details.

At the same time, the last few years have seen unprecedented claims of allegedly “rogue” judging from the White House — claims that are only emboldened by the Supreme Court majority’s string of “emergency” rulings slapping down good-faith attempts to hold Trump to the rule of law. 

Acting attorney general Todd Blanche told an audience in November of 2025 that the Justice Department is at “war” with lower federal court judges who allegedly abuse power. Blanche’s predecessor, former attorney general Pam Bondi, threatened to prosecute “deranged” judges. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has complained of a “judicial insurrection” and “indefensible judicial tyranny.” Vice President JD Vance pledged to “do battle” with “crazy far-left judges” who try to “take upon themselves powers that belong to the president.”

And Trump has assailed judges as “crooked,” “monsters” and “lunatics” who are “intimidated by the Radical Left” and hate America. He has even made digs at individual Supreme Court justices who didn’t fall in line with his desired outcomes in certain cases. Yet the justices in the Supreme Court’s majority act as if it is Trump who needs their emergency protection, not their colleagues in lower courts.

In the first five months of taking office, Trump filed 19 motions for emergency relief from the Supreme Court — more than twice the number of requests made by the Obama and George W. Bush administrations over 16 years. Trump won the overwhelming majority of those petitions. Boiled down, his theory for requiring the high court’s immediate rescue from adverse rulings from the lower federal courts is that merely having to comply with binding, settled law — like every president before him — is somehow akin to a five-alarm fire.

Trump’s friendly majority has accepted this absurdity time and again, giving him the fast-tracked injunctions he wants without thorough briefings, oral arguments, or written decisions laying out the court’s reasoning for the benefit of the public. Historically, the emergency docket has been reserved for actual threats of irreparable harm, such as inmates staring down death sentences within hours. 

The supposed emergencies that the majority sees as warranting immediate relief for Trump have included, for example, merely being required by lower federal courts to comply with the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause before sending migrants to South Sudan, where they could face torture. They have also included mere compliance with the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures in connection with immigration crackdowns in Los Angeles.

When asked about the so-called “shadow docket” on Tuesday, Justice Kagan offered that there are “downsides of using emergency relief.” What didn’t get discussed is the impression created in the American psyche when the Supreme Court reflexively greenlights Trump’s lawlessness as an “emergency” of such magnitude that it requires swatting down lower courts for merely doing their jobs. That job is to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the U.S.

Congress would do well one day to call the justices back before the American public to explain what, according to each one of them, that oath really means in the dark age of Trumpism.

Kimberly Wehle is a law professor and author of “How to Read the Constitution — and Why,” “What You Need to Know About Voting — and Why” and “How to Think Like a Lawyer — and Why,” and the Substack newsletter, “The Little Law School.”

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