Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett told a House appropriations panel this week that threats against federal judges have reached alarming levels, and that her own children have been forced to confront the reality of bulletproof vests, swatting attacks, and police convoys outside their home.
Barrett and Justice Elena Kagan appeared together before the House Appropriations subcommittee on financial services and general government to present the Supreme Court's fiscal year 2027 budget request of $228.4 million, a nearly 10% jump over the $207.8 million Congress appropriated for the current fiscal year. The increase is driven almost entirely by security and cybersecurity costs, CNBC reported.
The hearing marked the first time Supreme Court justices had testified before Congress since 2019, when Kagan and Justice Samuel Alito made the trip to Capitol Hill. What they described this time was a federal judiciary under siege, not from legal challenges, but from direct physical threats against the men and women who sit on the bench.
The numbers alone tell a grim story. U.S. Marshals Service data show 512 investigations of threats against federal judges since the beginning of 2026. For all of 2025, the total was 807. With roughly half the year gone, the current pace puts 2026 on track to far exceed last year.
There are approximately 2,600 active federal judges in the country. That means roughly one in five has already been the subject of a threat investigation this year.
Kagan cited Supreme Court Police projections of a 38% annual increase in threats during the current year, following a 25% increase the year before. She also referenced testimony from the U.S. Capitol Police chief indicating that threats against Congress are up 50% compared with 2025.
"For some of us, those threats have come very close, and all of us live with the knowledge that they may again materialize."
That was Kagan. Barrett was more specific, and more personal.
Barrett described how, in the spring of 2022, her security detail sent her home with a bulletproof vest after threats against her life escalated following the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion. She carried it into her house and set it on a table in her bedroom. When she turned around, her then-12-year-old son was standing in the doorway.
"He wanted to know what it was and why I had it. I didn't know how to respond because maybe I lack imagination, but I didn't expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one."
That leak, which preceded the Court's decision reversing the 1973 ruling on abortion, also prompted a California man named Nicholas Roske to travel to Justice Brett Kavanaugh's Maryland home with the intent to assassinate him. Roske told police he was upset about the leaked decision. He was arrested and later sentenced to more than eight years in prison.
Barrett's recent rulings have drawn sharp criticism from some conservatives, but the threats she described are not partisan grievances aired in op-eds. They are criminal acts aimed at a sitting justice and her family.
Barrett recounted another incident in which one of her teenage sons opened the front door to go out with friends and found their street filled with police cars. Officers had responded to a false report of gunshots and raised voices inside her home, a swatting attack.
"I was very, very grateful that I had Supreme Court Police outside my home because they were able to stop and meet with and explain to the county police that it had been a false alarm, and so the police did not actually attempt to enter our home."
She also told lawmakers that justices have received "threatening anonymous deliveries designed to intimidate and harass us." She did not describe the deliveries in detail.
The Just The News report on the hearing noted that the budget request includes $14.6 million specifically for security enhancements, driven in part by the swatting incident targeting Barrett.
Barrett put the threat statistics in human terms during her testimony.
"Those statistics sound abstract, but being on the receiving end of them is not."
The justices also addressed a less visible but growing danger: cyberattacks against the court's systems. Barrett told the subcommittee that cybersecurity attacks have increased "by magnitudes year after year" and that the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence is accelerating the risk.
She noted that while the Supreme Court itself has not suffered "the kind of paralyzing attacks that some of the lower courts have," the court has moved to ramp up protections quickly. Part of the new budget request, she said, is for additional cybersecurity experts.
Kagan offered a striking contrast to illustrate how much the security landscape has changed. When she joined the court in 2010, after being nominated by President Barack Obama, the Supreme Court Police "focused almost exclusively on protecting the building," she said. The IT department, she added, was busy "supporting the latest BlackBerry devices."
"I didn't have a security team of my own, and I was accompanied by security personnel only when I participated in work-related public events."
That world is gone. Kagan said the court began expanding its security program "in earnest in 2017, initially at the behest of members of Congress." The majority of last year's funding increase, she explained, went toward shifting responsibility for residential security of the justices from the U.S. Marshals Service to the Supreme Court Police.
Barrett's appearance on Capitol Hill came at a moment of broader political tension surrounding the Court. The Washington Examiner reported that Barrett was expected to face questions from Republican lawmakers over her controversial vote on the birthright citizenship case, in which she sided against a Trump administration priority.
That ruling prompted a forceful dissent from Justice Clarence Thomas, who warned the decision "devalues" what it means to be American. The administration subsequently announced a rehearing bid after the narrow defeat.
Barrett has also drawn attention for siding with the Court's liberal wing on other occasions, a pattern that has frustrated some Republican voters who expected a more reliably conservative vote from a Trump nominee.
But whatever disagreements conservatives may have with Barrett's jurisprudence, the threats against her and her colleagues are a separate matter entirely. Rep. Dave Joyce, the Ohio Republican who chairs the subcommittee, opened the hearing by making that distinction plainly.
"Whatever one's view of the specific Supreme Court ruling, judicial officers, up to and including the justices of the Supreme Court, must be able to do their jobs without fear for their safety or their family's safety."
The hearing also touched on the Court's emergency docket, the so-called "shadow docket" that has drawn criticism from both sides of the political aisle. The Washington Times reported that both justices discussed efforts to bring more transparency to emergency rulings, including requesting broader briefing and oral arguments in major cases.
Kagan told lawmakers the Court has "at least tried to do better in important cases in ensuring we have some degree of regular-ish process." Barrett described the challenge more bluntly: "On the emergency docket it's like, you just take all comers, and you have to grant or deny these motions as filed."
Barrett and Kagan were also scheduled to testify before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on financial services and general government on Tuesday afternoon.
The numbers Barrett and Kagan presented are not abstractions. Five hundred twelve threat investigations in half a year. A 38% projected spike on top of a 25% spike. A man sentenced to prison for plotting to kill a justice at his home. A child asking his mother why she owns a bulletproof vest.
The $228.4 million budget request is not a small number. But the question Congress should be asking is not whether the Court deserves more money. It is why, in a republic that claims to honor the rule of law, the people charged with interpreting that law need armed guards at their front doors and cybersecurity teams working around the clock just to do their jobs.
A society that tolerates threats against its judges is a society that has already started to lose something it cannot easily replace.
