Homeland Security's top lawyer is now facing formal discipline proceedings over a summer spent publicly ranking federal judges by name. On Wednesday, August 19, 128 retired state and federal judges — joined by the advocacy groups Democracy Defenders Fund and Lawyers Defending American Democracy — asked The Florida Bar to investigate DHS General Counsel James Percival for a social media campaign he calls "Worst of the Worst, District Judge Edition." Former Florida Chief Justice Peggy Quince leads the list of signatories.
The complaint leans on Florida Rule of Professional Conduct 4-8.2(a), which bars licensed attorneys from making statements about a judge's integrity or qualifications that they know to be false, or make with reckless disregard for the truth. Much of the 24-page filing zeroes in on Percival's characterization of U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, who oversaw litigation tied to the administration's push to end Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals. According to Bloomberg Law's account of the filing, the retired judges say there's no factual basis in the record for Percival's claim that Burroughs deliberately slow-walked her schedule to frustrate deportation efforts.
Where the campaign started
Percival opened the series on his official X account on July 23, posting a thread that named four sitting judges by their appointing president: Matthew Kennelly of the Northern District of Illinois (Clinton), Allison Burroughs of the District of Massachusetts (Obama), Paula Xinis of the District of Maryland (Obama), and Hernán Vera of the Central District of California (Biden). Notably, no Trump appointee made the list. Each judge had recently ruled against DHS on an immigration matter: Kennelly had paused the winding-down of TPS protections for people from Burma, Xinis had ordered the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and Vera had limited how immigration officers could use force against protesters and legal observers during the Los Angeles enforcement operations. Percival modeled the series explicitly on an existing DHS feature that publicizes deported immigrants with criminal histories, borrowing its "worst of the worst" branding directly.
By the next day, Percival had widened his target list. He labeled senior Massachusetts judge Patti Saris "rogue" and told his followers that a broader group of district judges was engaged in what he called a "mutiny against the Supreme Court." The International Academy of Trial Lawyers formally condemned the escalation as an attempt to intimidate the federal bench, and the American Board of Trial Advocates issued a similar rebuke, writing that Percival's post "served no legitimate administrative purpose."
A judiciary already bracing for violence
None of this is unfolding in a vacuum. The U.S. Marshals Service — the agency tasked with judicial security — has logged 415 distinct threats against federal judges in fiscal 2026 through August 17 alone, spread across 307 different jurists, according to figures cited in multiple outlets' coverage of the complaint, including Axios. That's on top of an already-elevated fiscal 2025, in which the Marshals Service recorded 564 threats for the full year, a number confirmed in Bloomberg Law's reporting on the agency's funding requests to Congress.
That backdrop is why two sitting judges — Esther Salas of New Jersey, whose 20-year-old son was murdered at their home in 2020 by a man who had a case before her, and Beth Bloom of the Southern District of Florida — used a virtual briefing on July 31 to publicly ask Percival to take the posts down. Salas kept her appeal simple, asking that political figures "tone it down." Bloom went further, comparing the series to a "Wanted"-poster-style display that had once hung outside a Republican lawmaker's Capitol Hill office, and calling it, in Bloomberg Law's telling, an intimidation tactic rather than legitimate criticism.
Neither Percival nor DHS is backing down
DHS has stood behind its top lawyer throughout. A department spokesperson told Bloomberg Law the thread does nothing more than lay out judicial rulings and their consequences accurately, and suggested that if accurately describing a ruling generates controversy, the underlying ruling — not the description of it — is what deserves scrutiny.
Percival has been even more combative in his own voice. After a Chicago Sun-Times reporter asked DHS whether the posts risked provoking further threats against judges, Percival told Fox News Digital readers should "witness the absolute absurdity of the liberal media response," arguing that fact-based criticism of judges is fair game in a free society and that reporters only object when the judge in question leans liberal. That same article carried a response from Sean Lewis, a spokesperson for the Northern District of Illinois, who noted that the judicial Code of Conduct instructs sitting judges to rule on the law and the facts rather than out of concern for "political pressure, public reaction, partisan interests or fear of criticism," and that litigants who disagree with a ruling already have the appellate process available to them.
Once the bar complaint became public, Percival didn't retreat either. He suggested on X that the backlash only proved he'd struck a nerve, accusing his critics of protecting what he called their "golden goose" of judicial activism. He also singled out Quince directly, framing the complaint as retaliation for calling out what he sees as activism from the bench, and announced plans for a mocking honor: the Justice Peggy Quince Lifetime Achievement Award for Worst of the Worst Judging.
Who is James Percival
Percival, 40, is a licensed Florida attorney whose road to DHS ran through the state attorney general's office, where he served as chief of staff to Ashley Moody. That chapter closed when Moody left the AG post in January 2025 to fill Florida's vacant U.S. Senate seat. Percival didn't follow her to Washington immediately — the White House nominated him for the DHS general counsel post roughly two months later, in March 2025, and the full Senate confirmed him on December 18, 2025.
What comes next
The Florida Bar hasn't set a public timetable for reviewing the complaint, and observers aren't especially optimistic about a fast resolution — or any resolution at all. Attorney Brian Tannebaum, who represents law firms before the Bar, told Axios he doubts the Bar will open a formal investigation, pointing to its earlier decision not to pursue a similar complaint against former Attorney General Pam Bondi. Separate reporting notes that only about a quarter of complaints filed with the Bar ever result in a disciplinary file being opened at all. DHS, for its part, has largely declined to engage directly with reporters covering the story, instead pointing them back to Percival's own social media statements.
What's left is a stark stand-off: a sitting DHS official's ongoing public campaign against named federal judges, running headlong into the professional conduct rules meant to keep licensed attorneys from attacking judicial integrity without cause — now sitting, indefinitely, with Florida's bar disciplinary process.
