Saturday Rewind: Federal judges speak up
The week Chief Justice Roberts warned hostility against judges has "got to stop," four sitting judges discussed rising threats against them.
Roughly half a decade ago, U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom struck down a Florida state immigration law as unconstitutional, painstakingly detailing in a 110-page ruling how trial evidence established that “overtly racist, nationalist, and xenophobic” hate groups helped draft the legislation.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who backed Senate Bill 168, attacked her as an “Obama judge,” and thousands of threats poured in against her.
“I needed to have protection from the Marshal and also from our local police department,” Bloom told All Rise News in an interview. “So I have been there and I know what it’s like. Our daughter was still at home. She was not yet in college.”
Federal judges reportedly received more than 500 threats between October 2024 and September 2025, and many of those implicitly target their family members.
One form of threat, known as “pizza doxxing,” involves sending pizza deliveries to judge’s homes, often in the name of Daniel Anderl, the late son of Judge Esther Salas who was murdered by a disgruntled litigant in 2020.
“We know that as public servants we signed up for this job, but when it comes to personal safety, our family hasn’t signed up for that,” Bloom said. “So it was an unnerving time, and it lasted for quite some time following the threats that were made.”
Earlier this week, Judge Bloom moderated a panel of four sitting federal judges targeted by such threats at an event organized by the group Speak Up for Justice: Judge Ana Reyes from Washington, D.C.; Judge Michelle Court from the Central District of California; Chief Judge Dolly M. Gee from the Central District of California; and Judge Mark S. Norris from the Western District of Tennessee.
At the event, Judge Norris spoke of being a pizza doxxing target — with the delivery in Anderl’s name.
After issuing an order blocking the Trump administration from dismantling temporary protected status for Haitian immigrants, Judge Reyes received a flood of threats and read them from the bench at a hearing.
Reyes recited one of them: “The best way you could help America is to eat a bullet. I pray you do the right thing, because I will go to church and thank their God. And you and all the other pieces of s*** democrat judges, like I said, save America and bite down on that slug.”
In February, the U.S. Judicial Conference — the administrative body for federal courts — relaxed rules in response to the wave of threats in order to allow judges to respond.
“It's a larger picture, and that is the attacks on the judiciary, the disinformation, the calling judges ‘corrupt’ or ‘woke’ or ‘unpatriotic,’” Bloom told All Rise News. “That's what's dangerous because there are individuals in the public that may believe that and act upon it as a result.”
This week, Chief Justice John Roberts also felt obligated to respond, telling an audience at Rice University: “Personally directed hostility is dangerous and has got to stop.” Although the chief justice didn’t mention Trump by name, Roberts has been on the receiving end of Trump’s personally directed attacks since ruling against him in the tariffs case.
Watch my interview with Judge Bloom in full on the All Rise News playlist on Legal AF.
All Rise News paid subscribers can watch this video and others ad-free below.
Also on the playlist this week:
Ex-Obama DHS lawyer breaks down upcoming immigration fight at SCOTUS.
WSJ revealed some of the backstory of the Maduro raid.
More on the Nexstar-Tegna merger.
