PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The pizza delivery was strange. No one at U.S. District Judge John McConnell’s home had ordered it. But it was the name on the order that shocked him.
Daniel Anderl.
McConnell knew what he had to do. He called Esther Salas, a fellow federal judge in a different state. He told her that he had received a delivery in the name of her son, who was shot and killed in 2020 by a disgruntled lawyer targeting Salas.
Such deliveries would be made to federal judges in at least seven states, but McConnell was the first to tell Salas, and both were distraught. Who would use someone’s dead child to threaten and intimidate? “I don’t think anything disturbed me as much as that did,” McConnell recalled.
For McConnell, the pizza delivery was part of a wave of threats unlike anything he had ever experienced and signaled a new era for federal judges.
His experience is emblematic of the climate facing such jurists, whether nominated by Democratic or Republican presidents, when they make high-profile rulings that find Trump administration actions to be unlawful.
President Donald Trump and his allies have repeatedly blasted individual federal judges as rogue actors and political activists whose rulings are illegitimate, including in a post last month by the top lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security.
Some judges have found the rhetoric so troubling that they are increasingly speaking out about the danger it poses to the rule of law, an unusual move for members of the judiciary, who prefer to avoid the limelight.
“We’re just doing our job,” McConnell said. “What’s unusual is the dehumanization, the threats, the personalization of our doing our jobs.”
McConnell, an appointee of President Barack Obama, is the chief federal judge in Rhode Island. For nearly all his 15 years on the federal bench, he worked in relative obscurity. He rarely gave his personal safety a second thought.
That changed dramatically starting early last year. McConnell, 68, received credible death threats. A MAGA activist doxed his daughter. Two Republicans in Congress started impeachment proceedings against him. An insurance company even canceled McConnell’s homeowner’s policy (the insured party was too risky, the firm indicated, with an attached link to one impeachment effort).
McConnell agreed to discuss his experience in detail with The Washington Post because he’s worried about ongoing efforts to intimidate and delegitimize judges. In his relatively small federal court, all three judges have received threats in connection with rulings against the executive branch over the past 18 months, he said. This spring, one of those colleagues was lambasted by DHS in a misleading news release, a statement that “put her in personal danger,” McConnell later wrote.
A DHS spokesperson declined to respond to questions about the news release and directed The Post to a recent statement by the agency’s general counsel, the same official who last month criticized judges on social media. “Legitimate fact based critique of judges and their rulings is fair game in a free society,” James Percival wrote in a post on the social media platform X.
Tensions between the different branches of government are not new, Salas, an Obama appointee in New Jersey, said in an interview. Over the past decade, she said, members of both parties have ratcheted up their rhetoric about judges. But what is occurring under the Trump administration — where the president and other officials have called federal judges “monsters,” “lunatics” and more, and deemed rulings a form of “legal insurrection” — is something else, she said.
“This is no longer apples to apples,” Salas said, stressing that she was speaking as a mother, rather than in her official capacity. “This is apples to watermelons.”
When asked about Trump’s personalized attacks on judges, a White House spokeswoman said such opinions are a form of free expression. The implication that Trump sharing his thoughts about judges is “akin to making threats is deeply unserious and should be dismissed by anyone with half a brain,” Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “No one understands the dangers of political violence more than President Trump,” she added. “The Trump Administration cares deeply for the safety of all members of the Judicial Branch.”
‘A dagger through my heart’
McConnell, a Rhode Island native, spent most of his career as a trial lawyer. He was also active in Democratic politics, making large donations over decades, and his nomination to the federal bench cleared the Senate on party lines in 2011. When “you take that oath,” McConnell said, “your North Star changes to the rule of law.”
When McConnell first started working in the granite-faced federal courthouse in Providence, he was nonchalant about questions of safety. He remembers being chided for not telling the U.S. marshals, who protect federal judges, about an outdoor naturalization ceremony he was conducting at a minor-league baseball stadium. “I thought, ‘I’m just going to live my life,’” McConnell said.
The drastic reassessment of his own security began early last year. In late January, McConnell was randomly assigned a case, as per procedure, challenging the Trump administration’s sweeping freeze on trillions of dollars in federal funding. He granted a temporary restraining order. Ten days later, he reminded the government it was obliged to follow the order, noting that not complying would risk being held in criminal contempt.
That night, McConnell was at home alone reviewing legal papers when something startling popped up on his phone. Laura Loomer, a far-right political activist, had posted about him on the social media site X, accusing him of abusing his judicial power in the funding freeze case.
The post included a photo of McConnell’s daughter, who worked as a political appointee in the Department of Education under President Joe Biden. Elon Musk, X’s billionaire owner who was then heading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, recirculated the post to millions of followers.
“I signed up for whatever, I’ll take the lumps,” McConnell said. But when his daughter became a target, “I felt like someone put a dagger through my heart.”
It escalated from there. Disturbing calls and emails began arriving at the federal courthouse, first by the dozens, then by the hundreds, about 400 in total. McConnell’s case manager asked not to listen to them anymore.
McConnell recently played one that is saved on his phone. In an expletive-filled rant, the caller accuses of McConnell of “stepping way over” his “boundaries.”
“You better tell little motherf—ing Judge McConnell, I don’t know who the hell he thinks he is,” the caller said. “I wish somebody would f—ing assassinate your a–.”
The U.S. Marshals Service told McConnell they had identified at least six credible death threats. One specifically menaced McConnell’s wife. Another turned up on the dark web — the swath of the internet not accessible to search engines — where someone was looking for McConnell’s home address, saying Smith & Wesson wanted “to pay him a visit.”
(McConnell won’t discuss the specific changes made to his daily routine, except to say that the cooperation with the U.S. marshals has been “exemplary.”)
McConnell’s experience is not unique. In recent years, federal judges and Supreme Court justices have faced increasing risks to their safety. In the 2025 fiscal year, security incidents of “significant concern” jumped 57 percent and are on track to rise again, the judiciary recently told Congress.
According to the Marshals Service, there were 564 threats to federal judges in the 2025 fiscal year, up from 509 the prior year. In April, the agency asked for additional funding for its judicial security division, noting that “the current and future threat environment [is] expected to intensify.”
The Trump administration has continued to launch personal attacks on judges. In April, DHS issued a news release referring to U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose, one of McConnell’s colleagues in Rhode Island, as an “activist Biden judge” who had released an immigrant “wanted for murder” in the Dominican Republic.
The problem: When DuBose released the immigrant from custody, she was unaware of the homicide warrant against him. That information was purposely withheld by the U.S. attorney in the case, who was acting on instructions from Immigration and Customs Enforcement not to disclose it, a subsequent 80-page investigative report by a special counsel found.
The sequence of events raises the question of whether ICE “deliberately manipulated” the information it presented in the case to attack DuBose, the court said in a statement last month. “False statements by government officials … interfere with the rule of law, and as we have seen, have real world consequences,” it continued.
Last month, Percival, the top DHS lawyer, posted a list of federal judges, calling them the “Worst of the Worst” — the same language the agency uses to highlight alleged criminals it seeks to deport. McConnell reached out to one of the people named in the post. His message to that judge: Take your security seriously, know the resources available to you and be careful.
On a personal level, McConnell said, he puts his faith in the marshals when it comes to protecting him and his family. The fear that stayed with him was what the threats meant for the future of the judiciary. Attempts to intimidate judges strike “at the very heart of the constitutional role of the courts as the preserver of the rule of law in our country,” McConnell said.
McConnell said he was heartened by statements by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who has said criticism of judges as individuals — rather than of their rulings — is “not appropriate.” Roberts has also repeatedly stated that impeachment is not the correct response to a disagreement over a judicial decision. “That meant the world to me,” McConnell said.
Some of McConnell’s rulings have sparked a positive response. Last November, he issued a preliminary injunction preventing the administration from dismantling the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an agency created by Congress. Librarians across the country sent him a slew of appreciative postcards.
While the threatening calls and emails to McConnell’s office have ebbed since last year, they sometimes flare up. In June, McConnell ruled that the Trump administration’s move to freeze immigration-related applications for citizens of 39 countries was unlawful. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service “violated the very immigration laws that Congress has charged it with administering, as well as the administrative laws that govern the agency’s actions,” McConnell wrote.
The same month, a Republican member of Congress moved to impeach McConnell for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” saying he had “placed the interests of noncitizens” above the “national security of the United States.”
It was the second attempt to impeach McConnell, and the administrative office of the federal judiciary reached out to see if it could assist. McConnell declined. He just wanted to get back to doing his job.
The post This federal judge ruled against Trump. Then the threats began. appeared first on Washington Post.
