By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
A sharp increase in serious threats to judges in Florida and across the nation is starting to capture the public’s attention like a five-alarm nightmare.
The threats are relentless and diabolical. Bad actors are sending pizzas to judges’ homes “from Daniel Anderl,” the 20-year-old son of a New Jersey federal judge who was shot dead in the doorway of his family home by an assassin posing as a delivery person.
That tragedy five years ago jolted Daniel’s mother, U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, into activism for judicial security and independence. She and her husband Mark Anderl, who was critically wounded in the attack that killed their only child, lobbied Congress to pass the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act, which keeps judges’ personal information off public databases. Mark Anderl has undergone at least 13 surgeries. The judge was not injured; she was in the basement during the attack.
The deadly assault on Judge Salas’s family inspired many others, including her friend Miami U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom, to adopt her mission as their own.
In recent years judges have been stalked, trolled on social media and even menaced with SWAT teams lured to their homes by fake violent-crime reports. Judges once were accorded unqualified respect; now all they seem to get are death threats.
“This is not something new, but what we do know is that threats against judges are no longer rare events,” Judge Bloom said in an interview with Florida Bulldog.
She’s an organizer of Speak Up For Justice, a nonpartisan global movement that supports grassroots action for the common good. National media covered their July 31 webinar, “Judges break their silence: Attacks, intimidation and threats to democracy.”
“What’s happening in our country and our culture is, there’s a lot of toxic rhetoric from our leaders and the public is looking to our leaders for guidance,” Bloom said. “If a case that’s political in nature raises an issue that concerns politics, if their popular view is rejected, they feel that they’ve been betrayed.
“The leaders say the judges are going against the will of the people because they believe we’re beholden to the people, when we’re beholden only to the Constitution,” she said.
“When the public loses trust and confidence in the work that we do, that’s when our democracy is in trouble,” Bloom said. Along with like-minded colleagues, she’s trying to stem a rising tide of ignorance and hatred.
‘IT WAS A SCARY TIME’
Bloom speaks from 30 years of judicial experience with Miami-Dade County trial and appellate courts starting in 1995. In 2014 President Obama named her to the Southern District of Florida federal trial bench; the Senate confirmed her nomination by a 95-to-0 vote.
Bloom has received many accolades including the ABA Presidential Recognition Award. But a stack of honors didn’t spare her from a terrifying reaction to one of her decisions.
In 2019 Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a hugely consequential law that requires state and local law enforcers to help federal agents seize undocumented immigrants. Their advocates challenged the “sanctuary cities law” in Miami federal court and the case was randomly assigned to Bloom.
After a six-day trial, she released a 110-page ruling that blocked key parts of the law. Bloom found that the nominal “public safety” measure was really a bullhorn for far-right groups who had “direct access” to the bill’s drafters in the Republican-dominated Legislature.
“Allowing anti-immigrant hate groups that overtly promote xenophobic, nationalist, racist ideologies to be intimately involved in a bill’s legislative process is a significant departure from procedural norms,” she wrote in her 2021 decision.
In response, a DeSantis spokesman called Bloom “the Obama judge,” as if she were merely doing the bidding of her Democratic presidential sponsor. (The 11th Circuit federal appeals court in Atlanta overturned her ruling in 2023.)
Anonymous haters aimed “thousands” of threats at Bloom, she said. One screed prompted an arrest and prosecution.
“My home address was posted on a YouTube channel and I had to have 24-hour protection for three weeks,” Bloom said.
“It was a scary time.” Her child was home and preparing to leave for college, she said.
“I know firsthand that a threat against a judge doesn’t just affect the judge, it affects the judge’s family as well,” Bloom said. “I signed up for this, but my family didn’t.”
THE INCREASING NUMBERS
The U.S. Marshals Service, which protects all federal judges, identified 457 “credible” threats last year. That’s a 150 percent increase over 2019.
The data is incomplete because it doesn’t include state court judges, who far outnumber their federal counterparts. Ballotpedia counts nearly 1,770 federal judgeships; there are about 30,000 state judgeships, the National Judicial College says.
And state courts account for 90 to 95 percent of all U.S. litigation, according to the National Center for State Courts.
“If you look at just the numbers, it would be surprising that the numbers of threats were not there as documented about federal judges,” Bloom said.
Indeed, 56 percent of state court judges who responded to a 2024 survey by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges reported they had been threatened.
“In Miami-Dade County, several friends have been targets of attacks,” Bloom said. Not all have gone public about them, but that may be changing.
Miami-Dade County Court Judge Carroll Kelly has agreed to share her experience with two litigants who stalked and threatened her when she was the administrative judge of the court’s domestic violence division. Kelly is scheduled to participate in a Speak Up For Justice panel discussion next month, according to a spokesperson.
TEXAS STEPS UP FOR JUDGE
Florida and other statea are starting to recognize the need to identify, quantify and publicly report threats. The hope is that spotting and studying forensic patterns will lead to remedial action and prevent another violent attack on a judge.
“In order to do our jobs, we have to feel safe,” Texas District Judge Julie Kocurek told The 19th newsletter in April. In 2015 a tax-fraud defendant went to her Austin home, found her outside with her son, and fired a barrage of gunshots that left her severely injured by glass shards and shrapnel. The judge was in the hospital for 90 days and underwent dozens of operations.
Two years later the Texas Legislature passed the Judge Julie Kocurek Courthouse Security Act. The law opened a security division of the state’s Office of Court Administration and made other changes to ensure the safety of state court judges in their homes and courtrooms.
This March the Florida Supreme Court launched a 10-member judicial security workgroup and directed it to report back by May 29, 2026. The group will assess ongoing efforts to address judicial security, evaluate the need for statewide data collection, review education and training options and make recommendations for overall improvements.
Bloom agreed that dedicating more resources to threat prevention is beneficial but it’s only part of the solution.
“We need to focus on education as well,” she said. “The public distrusts what we do because they don’t understand the work that we do” as one of three co-equal branches of government, along with Congress and the executive branch headed by the president.
“What’s important to recognize is that judges are public servants. We’re just trying to do our job consistent with our oath,” Bloom said.
“We all have a responsibility to engage in respectful discourse, to seek common ground and to practice civility, which is fundamental to our democracy,” she said. “We all need to hold dearly the rule of law.”
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