In response to the national abortion debate, the Department of Homeland Security is warning law enforcement partners that there could be threats to the public and Supreme Court members, including threats of burning down or storming the US Supreme Court and murdering justices and their clerks, members of Congress, and lawful demonstrators.
Domestic violence extremists and criminal actors have adopted narratives around abortion rights to encourage violence, according to a Department of Homeland Security memo, potentially increasing the threat to government, religious, and reproductive healthcare personnel and facilities, as well as ideological opponents.
Intelligence officials think that people of various ideologies are seeking to rationalize and motivate assaults during authorized protests against abortion-related targets and ideological opponents.
According to the email, Supreme Court officers have detected a significant increase in social media threats of violence, with several presently under investigation. Some of the threats were made against Supreme Court justices and the building itself.
A social media administrator pushed other users to participate in persistent violence as an alternative to counterprotest on May 7, according to DHS authorities.
More than two dozen threats have been detected and reported to relevant authorities for further investigation by the National Capitol Region Threat Intelligence Consortium.
The document also mentions a threat made by Capitol Police against a religious abortion-rights rally, which was originally reported by CNN earlier this month. Officials have been watching an increase in social media discussion about the leaked abortion verdict, which indicates that the Supreme Court would likely tear down federally protected abortion access. Officials constructed an eight-foot non-scalable barrier surrounding the Supreme Court building days after the leaked draft was published in Politico.
For more than a year, federal authorities have warned that America is in a high-threat climate fueled by political ideas and misinformation. The report also notes that at least four violent clashes between ideological opponents have occurred during abortion-related rallies in Oregon and California since July 2021, with people using smoke grenades, paintball guns, batons, chemical irritants, and bats.
