Letter to Congress: 25 groups urge increased funds for judicial security

As judges confront an increasing and unprecedented number of threats, CREW and 24 other groups, including the League of Conservation Voters, Common Cause, People for the American Way and the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund sent a letter to the House and Senate appropriations committees urging legislators to bolster appropriations for judicial security and reject efforts to undercut the judiciary’s independence.

In the past decade, the volume of threats against judges who are simply doing their jobs has more than tripled, and the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) has needed to assign full-time security details to several federal judges. The mere existence of these efforts to intimidate judges—regardless of whether a judge is physically harmed—threatens judicial independence and undermines confidence in the judicial system. 

Following a wave of bomb threats, swatting, calls for violence and attacks on judges and their families, federal judges have implored members of Congress to act. “This is not hyperbole,” said federal District Judge Esther Salas, whose son was killed by a lawyer who had appeared before her. “I am begging our leaders to realize that there are lives at stake.” 

As the Judicial Conference wrote in an earlier letter to Congress, a failure to increase the judiciary’s appropriations for court security amidst escalating threats to judges and courthouses “mak[es] this situation unsustainable.” 

In the letter, the 25 groups urged Congress, as the branch solely responsible for appropriating sufficient security funding for the courts, to take seriously the effect of funding deficiencies. 

The groups urged Congress to explicitly require that the USMS fulfill the Judicial Conference’s requested security requirements, prevent the USMS from diverting judicial security funding to other purposes and provide adequate funding for the USMS to fulfill its statutory function. They also urged Congress to reject efforts to use the appropriations process to limit federal courts’ ability to issue injunctive relief or to impose or enforce contempt sanctions for failure to comply with such orders.

As the groups said in the letter, “We hope that as attacks on the judiciary increase, so too will your efforts to support both security for and the legitimacy of our third branch of government. The physical safety of judges and their families, the security of our courthouses and the independence of the judiciary depend on it.”