# COLUMN: The U.S. Marshals Between Two Masters — When Politics Devours Federal Justice

> There is a federal agency in the United States that few people talk about but everyone depends on without knowing it. The

- Author: Maxime Marquette
- Publisher: MadMax (https://mad-max.co)
- Section: Column
- Published: 2026-06-23
- Canonical URL: https://mad-max.co/en/article/chronique-les-u-s-marshals-entre-deux-maitres-quand-la-politique-devore-la-justi

## Introduction: America's Oldest Agency in the Crosshairs

### A two-century-old service at the center of a constitutional standoff

There is a federal agency in the United States that few people talk about but everyone depends on without knowing it. The **U.S. Marshals Service** was founded in 1789 by the **Judiciary Act**, under President George Washington himself. Its original mission was clear and unambiguous: **execute the orders of the federal courts**, protect judges, jurors, and witnesses, and ensure that justice could function unimpeded. Two hundred and thirty-seven years in existence, and now this institution finds itself on terrain it has never known: that of **deliberate politicization**.

In June 2026, the Marshals Service finds itself at the center of an unprecedented institutional crisis. On one side, federal judges are issuing arrest orders targeting members of the Trump administration for **contempt of court**. On the other, the White House and the Department of Justice — to which the agency directly reports — appear to want to redirect, slow down, or even weaponize this enforcement arm. America watches, stunned, as a war unfolds between two powers sharing the same armed agent.

### When institutional dependency becomes a vulnerability

The structural problem has long been understood, but it has never been more visible. The **U.S. Marshals Service is an agency of the Department of Justice**, itself led by an Attorney General appointed by the president and removable at his discretion. **Pam Bondi**, the former Attorney General, herself declared that her actions would be influenced by the president's will — breaking with a decades-long tradition of the DOJ's formal independence from the White House. In other words, the agency charged with executing judicial decisions ultimately answers to the very man those decisions sometimes directly target.

Constitutional scholars like **George Conway** warned publicly as early as early 2025 that this conflict of authority would implode. Conway said bluntly: "There is only one way for courts to enforce their orders against recalcitrant parties: send the U.S. Marshals to arrest people. And who controls the Marshals? The Department of Justice, which answers to Donald J. Trump." The prophecy came true with terrifying speed.

*I have covered American institutions for a long time, and I have never felt such tension. This is not an academic debate about the separation of powers: it is a real-time crisis, and I measure every day the discomfort of realizing that the safeguards we believed solid are, in reality, informal conventions that any determined president can choose to ignore.*

## June 18, 2026: The Day a Judge Said "Arrest Them"

### A date that will remain in the annals of American justice

On Friday, June 18, 2026, a federal judge crossed the Rubicon. After the Trump administration's legal and administrative team **failed to meet a compliance deadline set Thursday the 17th at 5:00 PM**, the magistrate signed a formal contempt order. This was not a fine, not a warning, not a certified letter. It was an arrest authorization. The court order — 14 pages according to documents reviewed by journalists present — **explicitly directed the U.S. Marshals Service** to "take all necessary steps to achieve compliance, including the physical arrest of the responsible parties."

The Marshals Service received the directive at 6:00 PM that same Friday. The White House legal team was notified at 7:30 PM. Emergency calls were placed over the following twenty-six hours to at least three senior DOJ officials. The question being asked behind closed doors was not legal, it was political: **would the Marshals actually execute the order?** And if Trump asked the DOJ to stop them, what would happen?

### Four individuals named by title, not by name

What made this order particularly explosive was its precision. The judge had identified **four individuals by their official title** — not by name — as responsible for the non-compliance. Individuals specifically targeted by a personal contempt order face potential **incarceration**, not merely financial penalties. The symbolic and legal scope was unprecedented: for the first time in recent American history, a federal court opened the path to the physical arrest of sitting senior executive branch officials.

The Court also designated an **independent special master** to oversee future compliance, and issued a separate order prohibiting the destruction, alteration, or transfer of documents related to the case, under penalty of renewed contempt exposure. The judicial architecture was clearly designed to withstand political pressure. On Wednesday, June 23, 2026, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals was due to rule on an emergency stay request filed by the government's attorneys — the same day this article was published.

*When I read these documents, I cannot help but think of a scene from a Kafka novel. The judge says: comply with the law. The executive says: no. The judge then says: I will have you arrested. And the arm of justice depends precisely on those the law seeks to arrest. This is not fiction — it is America in June 2026.*

## The Newsom Affair: The DOJ as a Tool of Political Intimidation

### When the threat of investigation replaces the electoral campaign

On June 15, 2026, California Governor **Gavin Newsom** publicly announced that the **federal Department of Justice had opened investigations** targeting him and his wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom. In a pointed video statement, Newsom said bluntly: "Donald Trump is not coming after me because of my critical tweets. He is targeting me because I am considering a presidential run." The nature of the alleged investigations — visits by federal agents to family friends and former associates — matched an already-documented operational pattern in other politically sensitive files.

Newsom described a particularly troubling scenario: federal agents demanding documents and "abusing the grand jury process, combing through years of irrelevant materials." For Newsom, the diagnosis was unsparing: "Donald Trump is the most corrupt person America has ever known. He has turned governmental power into personal tools to reward his allies and try to imprison his adversaries. His personal attorney now runs the Department of Justice." That last sentence deserves emphasis: **Todd Blanche**, the current Acting Attorney General, previously served as Trump's defense attorney in several of his criminal trials.

### A troubling precedent for Western democracy

The West's partners are watching these developments with growing unease. When a democratic government uses its **federal law enforcement agencies to investigate potential political adversaries**, it crosses a line ordinarily associated with authoritarian regimes — the very ones the West spends its time condemning. The argument that "the investigations began a year ago, not at the DOJ" reassures nobody: what matters is the perception, the context, and the systematic pattern taking shape.

In the state of California, Newsom's office filed a **FOIA** (Freedom of Information Act) request to obtain DOJ documents concerning "President Trump's politically motivated investigation" against the governor and his wife. This recourse to transparency instruments, ordinarily used by journalists or NGOs, by a sitting governor to defend himself against his own federal government, illustrates how far institutional trust has collapsed.

*Following the Newsom case, I experienced a sense of déjà vu — the feeling one gets reading transcripts of dissident trials in regimes I won't name but everyone recognizes. America is not there, it is far from there. But the direction this trajectory is heading troubles me deeply.*

## Minnesota, or the Punishment of Uncooperative States

### Subpoenas as an instrument of coercion

On June 22, 2026, Chief Federal Judge **Patrick J. Schiltz**, appointed by George W. Bush, quashed several subpoenas issued by the Trump administration against Minnesota Governor **Tim Walz**, State Attorney General **Keith Ellison**, Minneapolis Mayor **Jacob Frey**, and other local officials. These subpoenas had been issued at the height of **Operation Metro Surge**, the large deportation operation conducted by the federal administration in Minnesota earlier in the year.

Judge Schiltz's findings were scathing. He concluded that "the evidence suggesting that the challenged subpoenas were issued for illegal motives is overwhelming." He added that the DOJ had "failed — unsuccessfully — to provide even a single credible reason to justify these subpoenas." The real objective, according to the court, was clear: **"to coerce Minnesota officials into assisting the federal government in enforcing civil immigration laws, and to intimidate and punish them for their non-compliance."** A Republican-appointed judge concluded that Trump's DOJ had conducted an **unconstitutional retaliatory operation**.

### The 10th Amendment as the last line of defense

The Schiltz decision rested in part on the **10th Amendment to the Constitution**, which prohibits the federal government from commandeering state officials to implement federal policy. This fundamental principle of American federalism — long cherished by conservatives themselves — was being brandished not by progressives, but by a Republican magistrate to block a Republican administration. The contradiction did not escape observers.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey described the subpoenas as an attempt to "use the power of the Department of Justice against elected officials who disagree with the federal administration." Attorney General Ellison was even more direct: "The facts are undeniable: the Trump administration is targeting me because I am defending Minnesota's interests. In America, our political disagreements are settled at elections — and it should alarm Americans that Trump is weaponizing the judicial system against those he disagrees with."

*I found myself reading the Schiltz decision twice, because it is at once remarkable and frightening. Remarkable because a Bush-appointed judge held firm. Frightening because it came to this — a formal court order to stop an operation that the entire constitutional architecture should have made impossible from the start.*

## The "Anti-Weaponization" Fund: Rewarding Allies, Punishing Enemies

### A $1.776 billion fund for Trump's inner circle

In May 2026, the Trump administration announced the creation of an **Anti-Weaponization Fund** endowed with $1.776 billion — a figure whose choice was not coincidental, evoking the year 1776 and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The fund originated from a settlement between Trump and the **Internal Revenue Service**, following the leak of his 2019 and 2020 tax returns. As part of this deal, Trump withdrew his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for, among other things, immunity from future tax audits and the creation of this compensation fund. The current Acting Attorney General, **Todd Blanche**, Trump's former defense attorney, established the fund jointly with the Treasury Department.

The fund's structure was designed to evade any independent oversight: a five-member commission appointed by the Attorney General was to decide fund allocations, **with no possibility of judicial review** and no obligation to publish public reports. Blanche himself refused to assure Congress that individuals convicted of assaulting police officers during the January 6, 2021 events would be excluded from beneficiaries. Vice President J.D. Vance even mentioned that figures such as **Tina Peters** — a local official convicted in an election fraud case — and **Hunter Biden** could theoretically apply.

### Two federal judges, a bipartisan blockade

On June 12, 2026, federal Judge **Leonie Brinkema** extended her preliminary injunction blocking the fund, finding that Blanche's oral assurances before Congress were insufficient — particularly since Trump had himself declared wanting to proceed with the fund after his Attorney General's testimony. The judge gave the DOJ one week to produce written sworn statements confirming the fund's abandonment. In Washington D.C., Judge **Richard Leon** had warned the DOJ against "playing games" with the court.

Resistance to the fund was — notably — **bipartisan in the Senate**: Republicans joined Democrats in opposing it, forcing the administration to announce the project's abandonment. But Trump continued publicly praising its "great concept." Axios reported on June 1, 2026 that the fund was "effectively dead for now," according to two senior administration officials. The precision "for now" reassured nobody.

*This fund is, in my view, one of the most revealing episodes of this entire sequence. Not for its amount — although $1.776 billion of public funds distributed without judicial oversight is considerable — but for what it says about the mindset at the top of the state: reward the loyal, punish the critics, and find the institutional vehicles to do it legally.*

## Elon Musk's Private Security Force Wearing the Marshal's Badge

### The creeping privatization of a public agency

In April 2025, a revelation from **Mother Jones**, relayed by Raw Story, had caused a shock in American legal circles: **Elon Musk's private personal security** had been "deputized" — invested with official powers — by the U.S. Marshals Service. The Marshals Service can legally designate outside individuals as "special deputy marshals" for specific, time-limited missions. But this practice had always concerned local or state law enforcement — not private security teams attached to an influential billionaire within the administration.

The trigger for this step was itself revealing: a member of the **Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)** had contacted the Marshals Service to complain that individuals indicted in connection with January 6 were not being released quickly enough. Moreover, the New York Times and Washington Post had reported that DOGE had used the Marshals to force entry into a federal agency's offices, creating a "chaotic and traumatizing" scene. The exact identity of the men — were they real Marshals or Musk's security agents? — was sufficiently blurred that the DOJ refused to provide clarifications to the press.

### Legal scholars alarmed by an unprecedented precedent

**David Noll**, law professor at Rutgers University specializing in private law enforcement, was categorical: "Deputizing purely private individuals is not something that has been done in the 21st century or the 20th century." He added: "If a private security force is exercising the powers of the Marshals, we must ask whether it is acting in the public interest and whether it understands the regulations that apply to Marshals." **Jonathan Smith**, former head of civil rights at the DOJ, added: "When private entities acquire police powers, serious questions arise about their accountability and the rules they are going to follow."

James Meissner, a former Marshals Service supervisor, confirmed that this type of deputization of non-police personnel was "atypical" — a polite euphemism masking a harsher reality: there was no recent precedent. The combination of a two-century-old public agency, a billionaire heading an unelected "government office," and a White House prepared to do anything to accelerate its political priorities **created an institutional hybrid without a clear legal framework**, with arrest powers and access to secured spaces.

*I confess a certain difficulty writing this episode without it seeming to belong to a dystopian novel. The private security of a tech oligarch, invested with the federal powers of a two-hundred-and-thirty-year-old judicial agency, to accelerate the release of Capitol rioters — had I invented it, no publisher would have believed it.*

## Judges Under Threat: When the Marshals Become the Suspects

### An organized climate of violence against the judiciary

Since 2025, the U.S. Marshals Service itself has been alerting federal judges of an "unusually elevated threat level." These alerts — conveyed verbally or in writing — came while Trump, Elon Musk, and other White House allies were intensifying their public attacks against magistrates who opposed the administration's policies. Judge James Boasberg, appointed by... George W. Bush, was called a "radical left lunatic" by Trump on Truth Social after blocking certain deportations. Judges received death threats, were victims of **swatting** (fraudulent calls to law enforcement to trigger armed interventions at their homes), and had their personal addresses revealed via pizzas delivered to their homes.

In May 2025, Judge John Coughenour, also appointed by a Republican and boasting forty-three years on the bench, told the Wall Street Journal: "In forty-three years of service, there had never been a reason to worry that the Marshals Service would act inappropriately — until these past few years." His main concern was specific: **that Trump would order the Marshals to withdraw protection from judges who ruled against him**. The Marshals currently answer to Pam Bondi, an Attorney General known for her loyalty to the president.

### The idea of an independent judicial protection service

At a judicial conference gathering approximately fifty federal judges, a radical proposal emerged: **removing oversight of the Marshals from the executive branch and entrusting it directly to Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts**. This proposal — structurally inspired by the Capitol Police model, which answers to Congress rather than the executive — aimed to create an institutional "firewall" against political interference in the security of the judiciary.

In May 2025, Democratic senators formally introduced legislation to that effect. The bill created a commission composed of the Chief Justice and the Judicial Conference to supervise the Marshals Service — exactly as with the Capitol Police. The White House dismissed the idea out of hand, calling it "absurd." The DOJ assured that the Marshals would continue to "protect the safety and integrity of the federal courts." These assurances convinced nobody in the judiciary.

*I find it difficult not to see in this proposal for judicial independence an admission of powerlessness. When federal judges appointed for life by both Republican and Democratic presidents reach the point of considering equipping themselves with their own independent armed force, it means that trust in the executive has reached a breaking point that can no longer be ignored.*

## The Liz Oyer Affair: Marshals at Your Door to Intimidate You

### A former prosecutor receives a late-night Marshal visit

On April 7, 2025, at a hearing organized by Democratic lawmakers, former federal prosecutor **Liz Oyer** recounted a chilling episode. The evening before her testimony, around 9:15 PM, she had been notified that the Deputy Attorney General's office had ordered the Justice Department's security service to **dispatch two armed U.S. Marshals to her home** to deliver a letter — a letter that had already been sent to her by email. The Marshals were to arrive between 9:00 and 10:00 PM. The letter was a warning about her testimony the following day.

Oyer refused to be intimidated: "I will not be silenced in order to conceal ongoing corruption and abuse of authority within the Department of Justice." She specified that at no point had Todd Blanche's team contacted her by phone before sending armed agents to her home. This sequence — sending armed Marshals to a former DOJ colleague's home the night before her testimony — sent a shockwave through legal circles. Not because it was technically illegal, but because it demonstrated a **use of public force for purposes of manifest intimidation**.

### The DOJ as the president's "personal favor bank"

Oyer had lost her position after refusing to follow a directive asking her to restore firearm rights for **Mel Gibson**, the actor convicted of domestic violence in 2011 — an offense that under U.S. federal law permanently prohibits firearms possession. The prosecutor had applied the law. She had been asked to make an exception. She refused. She was fired. Before Congress, she stated that the DOJ should not function as "a personal favor bank for the president" and that "career officials are not the president's personal collectors."

This case is emblematic of a documented trend: the DOJ under Todd Blanche appears to operate according to a logic of **rewards for political allies and sanctions for detractors**. Career officials who oppose these directives are pushed out. Those who accept them are promoted. And the Marshals become the visible instrument of this new political economy of American federal justice.

*The Oyer episode haunts me, because it is so banal in its mechanics and so extraordinary in its implications. Two armed Marshals at 9:30 PM, an intimidation letter, a woman alone at home the night before her testimony. This is not a dictatorship. But it is something that regimes we condemn do routinely — and we no longer have the luxury of pretending it cannot happen here.*

## Trump, Court Orders, and the Doctrine of Calculated Refusal

### More than seventy-five court orders flouted

The stakes of the Marshals Service's politicization cannot be understood without measuring the full scale of the underlying challenge. According to legal experts and journalistic compilations, the Trump administration has violated **more than seventy-five federal court orders** since the start of its second term. This number is not partisan rhetoric: it emerges from judicial records themselves, from written findings by judges, including those appointed by Republican presidents. Judge James Boasberg, examining the administration's conduct in El Salvador deportations, wrote that the executive had shown "deliberate contempt" for his orders.

The mechanics of refusal follow a predictable pattern: the administration receives a court order, ignores it or interprets it creatively, appeals to a higher court, and in the interim, the fait accompli is created. When appeals succeed, the damage is already done. When they fail, the cycle resumes with a new order and a new violation. Judges, who have no army, have only one coercive enforcement tool: the **Marshals**. And that is precisely where the loop closes on itself.

### The question nobody wants to ask out loud

Retired Judge **Nancy Gertner** asked the question with disarming clarity: "If Trump wanted to be totally non-compliant, he could order the Department of Justice to be non-compliant. At that point, you have a full constitutional crisis. We're not there yet." That "not yet" has become one of the most troubling markers in the American constitutional debate: how long before "not yet" becomes "now"?

Because the institutional logic is relentless. If the president controls the DOJ, and if the DOJ controls the Marshals, and if the Marshals are the sole enforcement arm of court orders, then a president determined not to respect judicial decisions holds a de facto veto over the entire federal judicial system. This is not a theoretical hypothesis. It is the real institutional configuration of America in June 2026, and it operates according to exactly that logic on a daily basis.

*I do not know how to name what I feel writing this. It is not panic — I am a columnist, not an activist. But it is something close to consternation. The West has built for centuries systems of checks and balances precisely to prevent this situation. And I watch these systems being bypassed, one by one, methodically and apparently without return.*

## Institutional Memory, or How Democracies Tip

### Lessons of history: when agencies lose their neutrality

Institutional historian Peter Simi of Chapman University observed that this dynamic "underscores a broader crisis related to the decline of the legitimacy of American social institutions and the political divisions intensifying across the country." This sober formulation conceals a brutal reality: institutions do not disappear through spectacular coups. They erode through progressive diversions, accepted precedents, crossed lines without consequences, until yesterday's norm becomes the exception and the exception becomes the new norm.

The Marshals Service itself has a memory of resistance. Historically, when it received difficult or dangerous orders to execute — notably during the **forced desegregation of Southern universities in the 1960s** — it executed them "without asking questions," in the formulation of CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington). It is precisely that tradition of obedience to court orders that is now under pressure. Because the agency finds itself in an untenable position: its orders now potentially come from two contradictory masters.

### The nomination of Gadyaces Serralta as a loyalty test

Trump nominated **Gadyaces Serralta** to lead the Marshals Service, following the resignation of the previous director. The Senate, charged with confirming this nomination, faces a historic responsibility according to CREW: it must rigorously examine Serralta's commitment to the USMS's primary functions, his qualifications, and his fidelity to the Constitution. Because if the agency comes to be led by a presidential loyalist rather than a legal professional, the last institutional lock between the president's will and the execution of court orders will have snapped.

In 2021, the DOJ Inspector General's Office had already found that the USMS could not provide adequate protection services to magistrates, in part due to "competing agency priorities" — bureaucratic language for saying Marshals were being diverted from their primary judicial mission. **Ronald Davis**, former USMS Director, had warned that protection demands and threats had become "unsustainable given current resources." Since then, threats have increased. And resources have been redirected.

*What I describe here is a phenomenon that political scientists call "institutional capture": a neutral public agency is progressively aligned with the political preferences of a single actor. I do not believe the Marshals have "fallen" — not yet. But the conditions for their fall are in place, and nobody in the halls of power seems in any hurry to prevent them.*

## $18 Million Diverted: Marshals Mobilized for Migration Politics

### A judicial protection budget cannibalized by the presidential agenda

In June 2026, documents obtained through a FOIA transparency lawsuit revealed that the **U.S. Marshals Service spent more than $18 million** to support the federal takeover of the Washington D.C. district between August 2025 and March 2026 — the so-called "federalization" of D.C. under Trump's authority. This deployment **diverted personnel and resources** from court security missions, fugitive apprehension operations, and tactical operations across the country. And this precisely while threats against federal judges were reaching historic highs.

The juxtaposition is vertiginous: while judges were receiving death threats, having their personal addresses revealed, and being victimized by swatting, the agents supposed to protect them were being redeployed to execute the administration's political priorities. Congress had voted specific funds for judicial protection and courthouse reinforcement — funds that the USMS, enjoying "broad discretion" in the use of its budgets according to CREW reports, partially reallocated to other purposes.

### A budget report that became an indictment

CREW filed before Congress, in April 2026, testimony on the USMS's FY2027 budget that documented these deviations. The organization noted that the agency appeared to enjoy "very broad discretion" in allocating its resources, without Congress's oversight mechanisms being sufficiently robust to take stock of this. This **budgetary opacity**, combined with politically loyal leadership, creates ideal conditions for presidential priorities to override the agency's legal mandates.

The report noted that federal law requires the USMS Director to consult the Judicial Conference on security needs and take those needs into account in resource allocation decisions. This consultation appears to have remained a formality. The $18 million spent on D.C. migration policy was not submitted for the Judicial Conference's approval. It was spent because the president wanted the USMS there, and the agency's director complied.

*Eighteen million dollars diverted from the protection of judges while judges are receiving death threats — I rewrote that sentence three times to make sure I wasn't mistaken. I wasn't mistaken. And the fact that nobody is held accountable for this, that it isn't even considered a major scandal in the daily maelstrom of American news, says something alarming about the level of acclimatization we have developed.*

## Judicial Resistance: The Judges Who Are Holding

### Magistrates appointed by both parties facing the same pressure

One of the most striking aspects of this crisis is that judicial resistance does not conform to partisan lines. Judge Patrick Schiltz, appointed by Bush, quashed the subpoenas against Walz. Judge James Boasberg, also appointed by Bush, held firm on deportations despite Trump's personal attacks. Judge John Coughenour, appointed by Reagan, blocked the end of birthright citizenship. These Republican-appointed magistrates refuse to bend before an executive that considers them political enemies because they apply the law as written.

In March 2026, at an exceptional judicial forum, judges appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents collectively read aloud the obscene threatening messages they had received. This act — unusual, almost theatrical in its sobriety — was a way of publicly documenting a reality the administration sought to minimize. Chief Justice John Roberts, in his year-end annual report for 2024, had already condemned "hostile threats against judges and the security measures taken in response" — including the use of bulletproof vests and permanent bodyguards.

### An institution holding — but for how long?

The question is not whether individual judges have courage — they clearly do. The question is whether the **overall institutional system** still has the resources to enforce their decisions. Because a court that hands down sentences it cannot enforce is no longer a court: it is an echo chamber. And if the enforcement arm — the Marshals — is controlled by the party against whom the sentences are directed, then the system of independent justice ceases to function as such, regardless of individual magistrates' bravery.

The 249 lawsuits against Trump administration actions catalogued by the organization Just Security illustrate the scale of the judicial front opened against the White House. Each of these lawsuits is an individual battle. But the systemic war — the one over who controls the armed arm of justice — plays out at a deeper, less visible, and perhaps more decisive level.

*I watch these judges hold firm with genuine admiration and equally genuine unease. Their individual courage is undeniable. But history teaches us that individual courage is not sufficient against systematic institutional capture. The safeguards hold because individuals choose to hold them. How much longer?*

## The West Watches, and Is Not Reassured

### What America's allies see from their capitals

From Brussels, Berlin, Paris, or Ottawa, the scenes unfolding in American courts are watched with a mixture of stupor and strategic calculation. America remains the pillar of the Western order — militarily, economically, symbolically. But an America whose judicial institutions are being weakened by the deliberate politicization of its armed arm sends a dangerous signal to its adversaries — and a disturbing signal to its allies. **Russia, China, Iran** know that American domestic disunion is their best strategic weapon.

The West has a direct interest in American institutional solidity. Not out of sentimental attachment to American democracy as a model, but because **the credibility of the liberal international order** rests largely on the United States' ability to demonstrate that its institutions function according to the rule of law. When American Marshals receive arrest orders against executive branch members and the question is publicly raised whether they will execute them, it is all that credibility that teeters.

### Trump as a necessary evil: the limits of the argument

It is possible to accept Trump as a "necessary evil" for the West — his firmness on certain security files, his role in negotiations with adversaries who only respond to a show of force — while acknowledging that the **politicization of the Marshals and federal law enforcement** is a distinct institutional drift, separable from and critiquable independently of his foreign policies. These two judgments do not exclude each other. Supporting the West's firmness against its enemies and condemning the diversion of judicial agencies for partisan purposes are not contradictory positions.

What is unacceptable is not Trump as a political personality — it is the systemic logic he installs and that could survive his term. Because the precedents created today — a Marshals Service deputizing private bodyguards, a DOJ subsidizing the president's political allies, Marshals sent to intimidate a witness — these precedents will be available to the next president, whoever that is, whether from the left or the right. **The institutional machine captures its driver as much as he drives it.**

*That is where I find myself, ultimately, writing this article I would have preferred not to have to write. I am neither naive nor alarmist. But I am a columnist, and my role is to name what I see. What I see is a two-century-old agency torn between two contradictory masters, a DOJ that increasingly resembles an instrument of score-settling, and a West watching with wide eyes. We have not lost yet. But we are no longer as far from the edge as we would like to believe.*

## Conclusion: The Rule of Law Is Not a Given — It Is a Daily Choice

### What this crisis reveals about the fragility of democracies

The story of the **U.S. Marshals** and their role in the American constitutional crisis of 2025–2026 is not the story of a corrupt agency. It is the story of a structurally vulnerable institution placed in an impossible position by political actors who decided to test the limits of what a democracy can tolerate. The Marshals themselves — their agents, their middle managers — are for the most part professionals who want to do their job. But the institutional framework in which they operate has been deliberately weakened, their resources diverted, their chain of command politicized.

The rule of law is not a natural property of democracies. It is a choice that institutional actors make every day, by respecting rules that do not physically compel them to do so, but that democratic culture has made socially and politically costly to violate. When that culture erodes — when violations become banal, when circumventions cost nothing — the constraint that keeps the system in place disappears. And it is that cultural erosion, more than any individual violation, that constitutes the deepest threat.

### A warning for the entire West

What is happening in the United States is not solely an American problem. It is a real-time laboratory of what happens when an established democracy, with solid institutions and a deep constitutional tradition, finds itself governed by actors determined to test those institutions to their limits. The conclusions of this experiment matter to every Western democracy — French, German, British, Canadian — because **the vulnerabilities are structurally similar**. The difference is not in the nature of the institutions. It is in the political will to respect them.

The West needs an America whose judges can count on their Marshals, whose prosecutors can work without fear of retaliation, whose judicial institutions can function without the armed arm of justice answering to those it is supposed to check. We have not yet reached the point of no return. But we are closer than we were in June 2025. And we will be closer still in June 2027 if nobody chooses to hold the line.

**By Maxime Marquette, columnist**

## Columnist's transparency note

### Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a **columnist and analyst**. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. **I claim analytical clarity**, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

### Method and sources

This text keeps the basic distinction between **verified facts and interpretive analysis**. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under **Sources**, never here.

**Primary source families** used by the publication, when the story has them: official statements from governments and international institutions, public statements by political leaders, reports from intergovernmental organisations, dispatches from recognised international news agencies.

**Secondary source families**: specialised publications, internationally recognised news media, analyses from established research institutions, reports from industry organisations.

When an article cites statistical, economic or geopolitical data, it comes from the institutions that produce it (intergovernmental organisations, central banks, national statistics offices), and the exact institution is named under **Sources**.

### Nature of the analysis

The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a **critical, contextual synthesis** based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted.

My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors.

This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text.

## Sources

### Primary sources

- [The Guardian — Judge quashes DOJ subpoenas against Minnesota officials (Walz, Ellison, Frey) — June 22, 2026](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/22/federal-subpoenas-minnesota-officials-order)

- [Axios — Newsom reveals Trump's DOJ is investigating him in connection with his potential presidential run — June 15, 2026](https://www.axios.com/2026/06/15/newsom-trump-doj-investigation-2028-election-claims)

- [CNBC — Judge Brinkema extends injunction against the $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization" fund — June 12, 2026](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/12/trump-doj-fund-preliminary-injunction-blanche-bessent.html)

### Secondary sources

- [CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) — Trump's politicization of the U.S. Marshals Service is a threat to our democracy — February 18, 2025](https://www.citizensforethics.org/news/analysis/trumps-politicization-of-the-u-s-marshals-service-is-a-threat-to-our-democracy/)

- [Raw Story — Experts alarmed: Musk's private security deputized by U.S. Marshals — April 7, 2025](https://www.rawstory.com/us-marshals/)

- [The Guardian — Federal judges consider their own independent armed force in the face of Trump's attacks — May 25, 2025](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/25/federal-judges-armed-security-doj-trump-attacks)

- [Raw Story — Liz Oyer testifies about two armed Marshals sent to her home the night before her testimony — April 7, 2025](https://www.rawstory.com/trump-justice-department-2671687592/)

- [Axios — Trump administration set to abandon the "weaponization" fund — June 1, 2026](https://www.axios.com/2026/06/01/trump-weaponization-fund-drop)

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Source: Maxime Marquette, MadMax. When citing, name the author and link https://mad-max.co/en/article/chronique-les-u-s-marshals-entre-deux-maitres-quand-la-politique-devore-la-justi