The murder on Sunday of the 20-year-old son (Daniel Anderl, pictured above) of a sitting Federal judge from North Brunswick and the serious wounding of her husband comes as President Donald J. Trump was caught sending unidentified armed Federal agents to the City of Portland, Oregon to apprehend leftist protestors off the street and hold them illegally to avenge graffiti on a Federal court house.

Judge Esther Salas has presided over high-profile trials like that of the former “Real Housewife” star Teresa Giudice and the suit brought by Deutsche Bank investors looking to hold President Trump’s bank accountable for failing to monitor “high-risk” customers including convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Salas was appointed by President Obama and was the first New Jersey Latina to be nominated for the

federal bench. According to multiple press reports, the shooter in the case was Roy Den Hollander, a right-wing anti-feminist attorney who had a matter pending before Salas and had appeared on Fox News.

According to press reports, Hollander traveled to the North Brunswick tree lined street where Salas’s family lived dressed as a FedEx deliveryman. His body was found in upstate New York on Monday after he apparently shot himself.

Hollander’s alleged actions comes amidst a growing trend of threats made against federal judges, according to the U.S. Marshall Service which is responsible for protecting them.

“In the 2019 fiscal year, the Marshals Service said there were 4,449 threats and inappropriate communications against its protected persons,” reported Ryan Reilly with the Huffington Post. “That’s a huge spike from 2015 when it logged just 926 threats.”

The huge spike in threats to the Federal bench are not happening in a vacuum.

Even before President Trump was sworn into office, he directed public ridicule at Federal Judge Gonzal Curiel, a widely respected jurist, because of the way Curiel ruled in a fraud case involving Trump University. Trump said Curiel was a “hater” because the judge was a “Mexican” and opposed Trump’s building his border wall.

Trump has continued to twitter target Federal judges for scorn and cyber bullying who presided over the DOJ criminal prosecutions of Mike Flynn, his former national security advisor, Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, and his longtime confidant Roger Stone, who were all convicted.

And every time he takes off on a sitting federal judge the self-styled “law and order” President adds to the burden of the U.S. Marshals that have to track individuals like Cesar Sayoc who are the fringe of Trump’s base. Last year, Sayoc, an ardent Trump supporter from Florida, was sentenced to 20 years for sending pipe bombs to over a dozen Trump opponents including former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

On May 29, Pat Underwood, a black DHS Federal Protective Services uniformed officer was assassinated while he was guarding a Federal courthouse in Oakland, California, amidst street protests over the in police custody death of George Floyd.

In that case, the FBI arrested Sgt. Steven Carrillo, 32, an active duty Air Force Sergeant and right-wing extremist who was hoping to exploit the mass protest from the Floyd murder to foment a second civil war. He was already in custody for the alleged June 6 fatal shooting of Santa Cruz County Deputy Sheriff and wounding of his partner in an ambush attack that included the use of multiple improvised explosives.

Just days after Underwood was killed, President Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr ordered elements of the U.S. Park Police and the National Guard to use pepper spray to clear Lafayette Park of peaceful protestors so that President Trump could walk from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church for a bible clutching photo-op.

Trump had been flanked during his provocative walk to the church by Attorney General Bill Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley. Milley later told a National Defense University commencement he “should not have been there” adding that his “presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”

These dystopian events are reminiscent of the authoritarian atmospherics in Chile as recounted in Costa-Gavra’s signature 1982 film “Missing”. The film chronicles the efforts of an American family to track the whereabouts of their journalist son who “disappeared” in the midst of General Augusto Pinochet’s military overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.

Our nation is slipping deeper and deeper into a pandemic that could kill as many as 200,000 by Election Day and one-in-five of American families could be evicted from their homes by the end of September.

Hollander previously sued multiple NBC News anchors, as well as anchors from other networks, and alleged they engaged in an illegal conspiracy to prevent Donald Trump’s election to the presidency. Meanwhile, the current occupant of the Oval Office fixates on extralegal strategies to “protect” Federal courthouses even as he perpetuates a climate of fear that has the judges that run them looking over their shoulder.