Harassing Supreme Court Justice Barrett at Home

Local police received a call on May 27 claiming to have heard gunshots at Justice Barrett’s residence. The call was a fake emergency meant to send police to swarm the home of the Justice and her family.

So-called swatting events like this are dangerous, sending armed officers into a home where an owner may think she is facing a break-in. Local law enforcement communicated with Supreme Court police to establish it was a hoax before sending officers. But the incident is the latest in a pattern of harassment of Justices’ families aimed at intimidation or worse.

Justice Barrett’s address is public thanks to Ruth Sent Us, the abortion-rights group that published the private addresses of the conservative Justices in 2022 after the leak of the Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. Progressives have since protested outside the homes of Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John Roberts.

In 2022 a transgender woman stalked the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh with a plan to kill him. Prosecutors asked for a 30-year sentence, but federal Judge Deborah Boardman sentenced the attacker to eight years in prison, about what the defense sought.

Many U.S. Attorneys are swamped with threats against public figures. The National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE) reported 133 federal criminal cases in 2025 involving threats against public officials, the highest since it began counting in 2013. Judges have learned to alert local police departments when they issue controversial opinions.

In his 2024 annual report on the judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts said threats against judges had tripled. In the previous five years. U.S. marshals said they investigated more than 1,000 serious threats against federal judges. President Trump hasn’t helped with personal attacks on the Justices, calling them an “embarrassment to their families” after the Court’s 6-3 ruling that struck down his emergency tariffs.

Progressives are currently attacking Justice Alito because his son works at the Treasury Department. Rep. Mike Levin (D., Calif.) posted on social media that “Samuel Alito’s son has worked as a lawyer inside Trump’s Treasury Department since early last year. The administration hid it . . . the public was never told.”

Never told? Why should the public care where the children of Justices work, unless it bears on a case they might hear?

Mr. Levin and others say Justice Alito should recuse himself on issues involving the Treasury Department. But unless his son is directly involved in litigating the case, we’d argue Justice Alito has a duty to sit on Treasury cases so litigants can be sure they’ll get a Court decision that isn’t 4-4.

In her book, “Listening to the Law,” Justice Barrett writes that being the target of protests “has changed my daily life,” but in a “society devoted to free speech, criticisms of public officials go with the territory.” That’s gracious and true, but it doesn’t make her family fair game.

Federal judges forgo lucrative law-firm partnerships or tenured chairs in academia for long days and a federal pay scale. Harassment and death threats aren’t part of the bargain in a country that values the rule of law.