Skip to content

Courts Under Fire, Judges on the Line: Right-Wing Attacks on the Judiciary

Starting with President Trump’s reelection last fall, we have witnessed an alarming escalation in rhetoric and action against the judicial branch at both the federal and state levels. From the White House to state legislatures, elected officials are challenging judicial authority in ways that, while not unprecedented in American history, threaten the very foundation of our constitutional system. These actions mirror their systemic attacks on prosecutors who oppose their agenda–removing elected district attorneys from office and creating unelected commissions with the power to oust local prosecutors.

When political leaders personally attack judges simply for ruling against their preferred policies, they undermine the legitimacy of an independent judiciary. These attacks aren’t merely words – they’re increasingly accompanied by concrete executive and legislative efforts to strip courts of jurisdiction, pack benches with ideological allies, or even impeach judges for their legal reasoning.

This erosion of judicial independence strikes at the heart of our constitutional system of checks and balances. Without courts empowered to review and potentially invalidate unconstitutional actions, the executive and legislative branches face few constraints on their power.

Trump and Allies Launch Unprecedented Attack on Federal Courts

Federal Judges Who Ruled Against Trump Policies Targeted By Officials

Trump and his allies have begun attacking federal judges who ruled against key administration policies. President Trump went after a judge’s ruling that halted DOGE’s ability to access Treasury payment systems, saying that “no judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of a decision.” Vice President JD Vance, a Yale Law trained attorney, shocked constitutional scholars by directly challenging judicial review and suggesting a president can ignore court orders he considers “illegitimate.”

After judges ruled that the administration must restore health websites and cannot freeze federal grant funding, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt accused them of “abusing their power,” claiming the “real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch.” Elon Musk has gone further, first demanding that a judge who ruled against DOGE should be impeached, then recently writing on X that “If ANY judge ANYWHERE can block EVERY Presidential order EVERYWHERE, we do NOT have democracy, we have TYRANNY of the JUDICIARY.” Musk has even labeled specific judges as “evil,” “corrupt,” and “scammers” to his over 200 million followers on X.

This dangerous rhetoric has moved beyond words to action, with Republican lawmakers introducing articles of impeachment against federal judges. While removing these judges faces significant hurdles, including a two-thirds Senate majority, these attempts are a threat designed to have a chilling effect on the judiciary’s willingness to rule against the administration.

These relentless attacks have triggered alarming real-world consequences, including social media death threats calling for judges to be beheaded or hanged, intimidating deliveries to judges’ homes, and such serious security concerns that the U.S. Marshals Service has increased protection for several judges who ruled against administration policies.

Immigration Judges Culled

Immigration judges are not independent Article III judges, but are instead employees of the Department of Justice. They are essential because they preside over the immigration court system, conducting removal proceedings and making decisions about asylum claims. During his first term, Trump already severely compromised the immigration court system by implementing radical changes that fundamentally undermined the system’s integrity.

The Trump administration has launched a significant attack on these judges, firing at least 20 immigration judges without public explanation, but possibly because they were the last to be hired under President Biden. Another 18 judges took the government’s deferred resignation offer.

More alarmingly, a new Department of Justice memo now indicates that immigration judges’ civil service protections against arbitrary removal may no longer be recognized, potentially allowing judges to be fired without cause. This memo could be designed to remove judges who don’t consistently rule against noncitizens in deportation and asylum cases, and replacing them with judges who will “rubber-stamp” deportation orders.

Immigration courts already face a massive backlog of approximately 4 million cases, with cases often not set for trial for 5-7 years. A 2023 Congressional Research report recommended hiring at least 300 judges to cope with the backlog. These mass firings will further strain this already overwhelmed system.

The war on the judiciary did not begin this year, nor is it confined to the federal bench. From as early as Trump’s first presidential term, groups like the American Bar Association and others have been sounding the alarms that judges are under unprecedented attack; those alarms have now reached a fever pitch and state judges are amongst the targets in a widespread effort to utterly undermine the judiciary–financially, legislatively, and rhetorically. But state courts, often ignored, are where to keep your focus: their decisions deeply impact our daily lives and can either imperil or “protect us when the federal government can’t or won’t.”    

Stripping Judicial Power
  • Texas. Included in the slew of pro-incarceration bail bills that just passed in the Texas Senate is a proposal to punish judges for their bail decisions. Judges, who in Texas and elsewhere are typically entrusted to weigh a number of factors as they decide whether to release someone before trial, would have to consider an additional factor that should have no place in those decisions: their jobs. Judges could face everything from sanctions to terminations if their bail decisions are opposed by the Abbott-controlled Commission on Judicial Conduct, after the governor has already declared that “activist judges” too often release people.
  • Utah. Utah’s Republican lawmakers are currently on a “revenge streak.” Fuming over the Utah Supreme Court’s recent decisions about gerrymandering and abortion, they have now introduced at least eight bills that take aim at the judiciary, including raising the percentage of votes required to become a justice or a judge, handing the governor the power to elect top judicial positions in the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, and putting legislators in charge of assessing judges with few rules or guardrails. This legislative  flurry “threaten[s] to attack, manipulate, retaliate, and control the Utah judiciary.”
Justice for Sale  
  • Wisconsin. While state Supreme Court races typically are quiet affairs, there is nothing typical about this year: the race for a Wisconsin Supreme Court judge is now predicted to be the most expensive judicial contest in history and “the most significant US election since November.” For Elon Musk, who has a Tesla lawsuit winding through the Wisconsin courts that is likely to  land before the state’s supreme court, the stakes are personal. Following a “buy…the court system” playbook pushed by Musk in Texas and a Heritage Foundation dark-money group in Oklahoma, Musk and other billionaires have poured millions into the race to back an openly MAGA candidate who could offer a direct and sympathetic ear to their causes, both personal and political. The negative ads against Democratic candidate Susan Crawford have featured doctored, and sometimes wrong,  pictures of Crawford and false allegations of election fraud. Crawford warns, “Elon Musk is trying to buy a seat on our supreme court so Brad Schimel can rubber-stamp his extreme agenda.”          
  • Delaware. Nearly 2.2 million businesses in this country incorporate in Delaware precisely because it is a business-friendly forum, but Elon Musk and a handful of other entrepreneurs are now throwing their money around to demand an even bigger slice of the pie. After a Delaware chief judge rejected Musk’s $56 billion Tesla pay package orchestrated through sham negotiations, Musk falsely accused the judge of “absolute corruption” and coordinated with companies like Dropbox and Meta to threaten a mass corporate exit dubbed  “DExit.” It is a move that would completely gut the state’s economy. State legislators have attempted to appease Musk and his crew by proposing a total overhaul of Delaware’s laws–a “Billionaire’s Bill”–that would neuter judicial discretion and further accommodate corporate interests. The Billionaire’s Bill will “…dramatically limit judicial oversight, and make it virtually impossible to hold greedy corporate actors accountable for self-dealing,” one consumer group warned.  
Veiled Threats
  • Colorado.  Trump’s DOJ has vowed to review the conviction of Tina Peters, a Republican election denier and former election clerk who was sentenced to nine years of prison for breaching a voting data system in 2021. They face only one problem: Peters was convicted of state crimes and therefore cannot be pardoned by the president. In an unprecedented move, the DOJ has now filed a letter with a federal judge urging him to exercise “prompt and careful consideration” of Peters’ case based in part on what they are insinuating was the state judge’s mishandling of Peters’ sentencing.  That same letter alludes to their investigation of “cases across the nation for abuses of the criminal justice process” pursuant to Trump’s executive order about so-called weaponization of justice. On top of that, some Colorado Republicans are now pressuring the administration to prosecute the “corrupt[…]”  judge and also withhold federal funding to Colorado until the governor pardons Peter.  
Overriding Election Results
  • North Carolina. Four months after Election Day, the North Carolina Supreme Court race is still unresolved because Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin refuses to accept the two recounts that confirm he lost the election. After being rebuffed by the state board of elections, Griffin is asking the state’s court of appeals (composed of at least one judge who donated to Griffin’s campaign) to throw out nearly 65,000 votes based on what he now alleges are violations of election rules.  

Courage in the Spotlight

  • When members of Union del Barrio, a California-based immigrant activist group, noticed five ICE agent vehicles gathering in a Target parking lot last month, they sprung into action to disrupt the impending raid. That night has unfolded like many others this year as the Trump administration works to ramp up deportation efforts. The activists rely on their eyes and their voices–a smattering of cell phones, radios, and megaphones–as they lead a network of neighborhood patrols to alert the state’s residents of raids and inform them of their legal rights.
  • Thousands of people–organized by 700 off-duty rangers called the Resistance Rangers–gathered in at least 145 of the country’s national park sites to stand up for public lands and the National Park Service employees who tend to them.
  • Seema Jilani, a pediatric physician based in Texas, has a plea for the Left, who she says is using the American South as a “punchline” instead of recognizing it as “ground zero for freedoms under assault”: “[T]ake your Ivy League family money and funnel it to those of us propping up the scaffolding of a flailing republic on your behalf… We in the south are a multicultural populace held hostage by voter suppression, gerrymandering to high hell, and the failures of legacy media establishments who refuse to acknowledge that humanity can exist in barefoot barbecues…”
  • Incarcerated voters and voting rights activists are marveling at a dramatic spike in voter turnout in Colorado thanks to a new law–first of its kind–that requires all jails in the state to provide incarcerated voters an in-person polling place. Take Jesus Rodriguez, a first-time voter who cast his vote from Jefferson County jail in November. “I never thought it would mean so much…it would be one of my top five experiences, being able to vote.”