The Department of Homeland Security runs a recurring social media feature called “Worst of the Worst,” in which it names individual immigrants it has deported and catalogs their alleged crimes. It’s a public relations effort to distract from the fact that 99 percent of what DHS does involves deporting random, clean record small business owners and killing innocent people. Whatever you think of the practice — and there is plenty to think about it — it made internal sense for an agency trying to justify its actions by vilifying a minuscule subset.
Last Thursday, DHS General Counsel James Percival launched a new spinoff: “Worst of the Worst, District Judge Edition.”
Over the course of four posts, Percival named four sitting federal judges: Matthew Kennelly of the Northern District of Illinois and Allison Burroughs of the District of Massachusetts, were identified for temporarily preserving deportation protections for Burmese and Somali immigrants while litigation played out. Paula Xinis of Maryland, who drew the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. “Remember Kilmar Abrego Garcia?” Percival wrote. “He is still in the country,” he adds as a gotcha, glossing over the part where the administration has already admitted they accidentally sent Abrego Garcia to an El Salvadoran slave prison. And Hernán Vera of the Central District of California, earns a mention for handling litigation over how DHS responded to immigration protests.
DHS told Bloomberg Law News that this is all very normal:
Percival’s social media thread “is nothing more than a factual review of judicial decisions and their real-world consequences.” … “If accurately describing a judge’s rulings is controversial, the issue isn’t the reporting, it’s the rulings themselves. The record speaks for itself. Facts aren’t attacks.”
“Worst of the worst” seems to ring in opinion, to be honest. Along with “judicial sabotage,” “deliberately sluggish,” “micromanaging,” and “crazy” — all characterizations from the Tweets — these claims are not facts by the classical definition. Or, by any definition while we’re at it. If the facts spoke for themselves, Percival wouldn’t spend the rest of his character limit trying to spin past the lengthy recitations of fact in all the opinions involved.
Which brings us to what Percival — who we will remind folks, we’ve already noted as someone who really should lose their law license when this is all over — told the Senate Homeland Security Committee when he was asking for this job:
I view the role of the General Counsel as limited. The attorneys in the federal government were not on the ballot. The President and his policy makers are the proper officials to make policy decisions for the federal government. The role of a General Counsel is to provide excellent, accurate legal advice free from political bias or motivation. If confirmed, that is what I would do.
That aged poorly. Percival has spent his run atop the DHS legal apparatus penning opinion columns for The Federalist — where he attacked a Rhode Island federal judge who had called out the administration when she discovered government lawyers lied to her — and the Wall Street Journal — where he defended warrantless home invasions.
The latter article he signed as “Jimmy Percival,” which gives L’il Rascals energy, if the L’il Rascals grew up and built a secret police force. On the other hand, this moniker was marginally helpful in researching his paper trail because it didn’t litter the results with links to the objectively better James by Percival Everett.
The point is, Percival has spent his time in this position explicitly trafficking in political bias, likely because his legal advice keeps losing. This is a guy who struggled with habeas corpus at his confirmation hearing, so the prospect of “accurate legal advice” was suspect from jump.
It’s one thing to criticize federal judges. We do it here all the time, and it can be a healthy to hold unelected, life-tenured officials to scrutiny. But none of us at Above the Law is presently a federal government official and none of us are comparing federal judges to murderers and kidnappers for an audience of thugs who already stormed the Capitol and tried to hang the vice president.
As Paul Kiesel, founder of Speak Up for Justice, explained:
[Percival] started posting on social media, calling sitting federal judges “worst of the worst” That is not a random phrase. That’s the same label DHS uses for its own series naming dangerous criminal immigrants that the agency has deported, its language built to justify removing people accused of violent crimes.
This is what transforms Percival’s thumb-warrior posts into a dangerous attack on the rule of law. We’re not writing this article if the DHS general counsel posts, “Judge X ruled against us, and we disagree with the ruling and plan to appeal.” We’re writing this because he lifted his own agency’s description for heinous criminals and slapped it on district judges following the letter of the law instead of rewriting it for “Mr. Accurate Legal Advice” here.
“What you don’t do is go public and target the judges personally, just because you didn’t like the way they ruled,” Kiesel said. “And picking and choosing which judges to attack based on whose rulings you don’t like isn’t accountability. That’s political loyalty testing, and it’s dangerous.”
And not just dangerous for abstract the rule of law. The U.S. Marshals Service tracked 564 threats against federal judges last fiscal year, up from 509. That’s about an 11 percent bump, which sounds almost manageable until you remember it’s compounding on a baseline that was already the worst on record, and that “tracked” means a threat serious enough to open a file on.
District judges are taking the brunt of this abuse because they insist on doing their jobs. The public doesn’t quite grasp the horrific nature of the threats they’re receiving for this with little to no support from the Department of Justice. Indeed, the potential future Attorney General used his government platform to declare “war” on federal judges. And the Supreme Court adds more fuel to the fire by rug pulling established caselaw from under district judges leaving the trial courts ripe for attack from cynical actors claiming they “got it wrong” when they dutifully applied the law as it existed until an unexplained shadow docket order issued five minutes ago.
As bad as it would be to have the DOJ and DHS recklessly priming a pre-existing powder keg of violence to bully and chill federal judges from upholding the law, the problem is they built the powder keg too. The rise in judicial threats has steadily risen throughout the Trump era — whether he’s been in office or seething from the outside. Goons like Percival reach for this “worst of the worst” rhetoric because it’s the top of the playbook they’ve worked out of for years now.
They’re going to keep doing it for years to come until there’s some accountability. And that’s all on the local licensing authorities. When all this is said and done and the people using their law degrees to push these disgraceful acts attempt to slither back to the private sector, professional authorities need to stand up and disbar them. They’ve undermined the integrity of the profession, attacked the rule of law our whole system relies upon, and losing the privilege of calling themselves lawyers and wreaking havoc on the public is our obligation as lawyers.
Earlier: District Judges Fight To Save The Rule Of Law While DOJ And Supreme Court Snicker
Legalweek’s Annual Judicial Panel: A Clear And Present Danger To Our Judges — And The Rule Of Law
‘I’ll Put A Bullet In Your Head’: The Disturbing Reality Of Being A Judge In America
‘The Silence Is Deafening’: Judge Esther Salas Blasts DOJ Over Threats Of Judicial Intimidation
Amy Coney Barrett Swatting Incident Tests Whether Anyone Cares About Threats To Judges Who Aren’t On SCOTUS
As Judicial Threats Spike, Mike Johnson Talks About ‘Making An Example’ Of Them
White House Has Absolutely Unhinged Response To Judicial Threats
Judge James Ho Big Mad Over Statement On Judicial Safety
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
The post DHS General Counsel Names Four Federal Judges ‘Worst Of The Worst’ As Threats Against Judiciary Hit 564 appeared first on Above the Law.
The Department of Homeland Security runs a recurring social media feature called “Worst of the Worst,” in which it names individual immigrants it has deported and catalogs their alleged crimes. It’s a public relations effort to distract from the fact that 99 percent of what DHS does involves deporting random, clean record small business owners and killing innocent people. Whatever you think of the practice — and there is plenty to think about it — it made internal sense for an agency trying to justify its actions by vilifying a minuscule subset.
Last Thursday, DHS General Counsel James Percival launched a new spinoff: “Worst of the Worst, District Judge Edition.”
Over the course of four posts, Percival named four sitting federal judges: Matthew Kennelly of the Northern District of Illinois and Allison Burroughs of the District of Massachusetts, were identified for temporarily preserving deportation protections for Burmese and Somali immigrants while litigation played out. Paula Xinis of Maryland, who drew the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. “Remember Kilmar Abrego Garcia?” Percival wrote. “He is still in the country,” he adds as a gotcha, glossing over the part where the administration has already admitted they accidentally sent Abrego Garcia to an El Salvadoran slave prison. And Hernán Vera of the Central District of California, earns a mention for handling litigation over how DHS responded to immigration protests.
DHS told Bloomberg Law News that this is all very normal:
Percival’s social media thread “is nothing more than a factual review of judicial decisions and their real-world consequences.” … “If accurately describing a judge’s rulings is controversial, the issue isn’t the reporting, it’s the rulings themselves. The record speaks for itself. Facts aren’t attacks.”
“Worst of the worst” seems to ring in opinion, to be honest. Along with “judicial sabotage,” “deliberately sluggish,” “micromanaging,” and “crazy” — all characterizations from the Tweets — these claims are not facts by the classical definition. Or, by any definition while we’re at it. If the facts spoke for themselves, Percival wouldn’t spend the rest of his character limit trying to spin past the lengthy recitations of fact in all the opinions involved.
Which brings us to what Percival — who we will remind folks, we’ve already noted as someone who really should lose their law license when this is all over — told the Senate Homeland Security Committee when he was asking for this job:
I view the role of the General Counsel as limited. The attorneys in the federal government were not on the ballot. The President and his policy makers are the proper officials to make policy decisions for the federal government. The role of a General Counsel is to provide excellent, accurate legal advice free from political bias or motivation. If confirmed, that is what I would do.
That aged poorly. Percival has spent his run atop the DHS legal apparatus penning opinion columns for The Federalist — where he attacked a Rhode Island federal judge who had called out the administration when she discovered government lawyers lied to her — and the Wall Street Journal — where he defended warrantless home invasions.
The latter article he signed as “Jimmy Percival,” which gives L’il Rascals energy, if the L’il Rascals grew up and built a secret police force. On the other hand, this moniker was marginally helpful in researching his paper trail because it didn’t litter the results with links to the objectively better James by Percival Everett.
The point is, Percival has spent his time in this position explicitly trafficking in political bias, likely because his legal advice keeps losing. This is a guy who struggled with habeas corpus at his confirmation hearing, so the prospect of “accurate legal advice” was suspect from jump.
It’s one thing to criticize federal judges. We do it here all the time, and it can be a healthy to hold unelected, life-tenured officials to scrutiny. But none of us at Above the Law is presently a federal government official and none of us are comparing federal judges to murderers and kidnappers for an audience of thugs who already stormed the Capitol and tried to hang the vice president.
As Paul Kiesel, founder of Speak Up for Justice, explained:
[Percival] started posting on social media, calling sitting federal judges “worst of the worst” That is not a random phrase. That’s the same label DHS uses for its own series naming dangerous criminal immigrants that the agency has deported, its language built to justify removing people accused of violent crimes.
This is what transforms Percival’s thumb-warrior posts into a dangerous attack on the rule of law. We’re not writing this article if the DHS general counsel posts, “Judge X ruled against us, and we disagree with the ruling and plan to appeal.” We’re writing this because he lifted his own agency’s description for heinous criminals and slapped it on district judges following the letter of the law instead of rewriting it for “Mr. Accurate Legal Advice” here.
“What you don’t do is go public and target the judges personally, just because you didn’t like the way they ruled,” Kiesel said. “And picking and choosing which judges to attack based on whose rulings you don’t like isn’t accountability. That’s political loyalty testing, and it’s dangerous.”
And not just dangerous for abstract the rule of law. The U.S. Marshals Service tracked 564 threats against federal judges last fiscal year, up from 509. That’s about an 11 percent bump, which sounds almost manageable until you remember it’s compounding on a baseline that was already the worst on record, and that “tracked” means a threat serious enough to open a file on.
District judges are taking the brunt of this abuse because they insist on doing their jobs. The public doesn’t quite grasp the horrific nature of the threats they’re receiving for this with little to no support from the Department of Justice. Indeed, the potential future Attorney General used his government platform to declare “war” on federal judges. And the Supreme Court adds more fuel to the fire by rug pulling established caselaw from under district judges leaving the trial courts ripe for attack from cynical actors claiming they “got it wrong” when they dutifully applied the law as it existed until an unexplained shadow docket order issued five minutes ago.
As bad as it would be to have the DOJ and DHS recklessly priming a pre-existing powder keg of violence to bully and chill federal judges from upholding the law, the problem is they built the powder keg too. The rise in judicial threats has steadily risen throughout the Trump era — whether he’s been in office or seething from the outside. Goons like Percival reach for this “worst of the worst” rhetoric because it’s the top of the playbook they’ve worked out of for years now.
They’re going to keep doing it for years to come until there’s some accountability. And that’s all on the local licensing authorities. When all this is said and done and the people using their law degrees to push these disgraceful acts attempt to slither back to the private sector, professional authorities need to stand up and disbar them. They’ve undermined the integrity of the profession, attacked the rule of law our whole system relies upon, and losing the privilege of calling themselves lawyers and wreaking havoc on the public is our obligation as lawyers.
Earlier: District Judges Fight To Save The Rule Of Law While DOJ And Supreme Court Snicker
Legalweek’s Annual Judicial Panel: A Clear And Present Danger To Our Judges — And The Rule Of Law
‘I’ll Put A Bullet In Your Head’: The Disturbing Reality Of Being A Judge In America
‘The Silence Is Deafening’: Judge Esther Salas Blasts DOJ Over Threats Of Judicial Intimidation
Amy Coney Barrett Swatting Incident Tests Whether Anyone Cares About Threats To Judges Who Aren’t On SCOTUS
As Judicial Threats Spike, Mike Johnson Talks About ‘Making An Example’ Of Them
White House Has Absolutely Unhinged Response To Judicial Threats
Judge James Ho Big Mad Over Statement On Judicial Safety
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
