Violent political speech has increasingly crossed into the realm of in-person confrontation for members of Congress in both parties, raising the prospect of a disastrous event.
WASHINGTON — In Bangor, Maine, an unknown visitor smashed a storm window at Senator Susan Collins’s home.
In Seattle, a man who had sent an angry email to Representative Pramila Jayapal repeatedly showed up outside the lawmaker’s house, armed with a semiautomatic handgun and shouting threats and profanities.
In Queens, a man who had traveled across the country waited in a cafe across the street from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office to confront her, part of a near-constant stream of threats and harassment that has prompted the congresswoman to switch her sleeping location at times and seek protection from a 24-hour security detail.
Members of Congress in both parties are experiencing a surge in threats and confrontations as a rise in violent political speech has increasingly crossed over into the realm of in-person intimidation and physical altercation. In the months since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, which brought lawmakers and the vice president within feet of rioters threatening their lives, Republicans and Democrats have faced stalking, armed visits to their homes, vandalism and assaults.
It is part of a chilling trend that many fear is only intensifying as lawmakers scatter to campaign and meet with voters around the country ahead of next month’s midterm congressional elections.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if a senator or House member were killed,” Ms. Collins, a Republican serving her fifth term, said in an interview. “What started with abusive phone calls is now translating into active threats of violence and real violence.”
In the five years after President Donald J. Trump was elected in 2016 following a campaign featuring a remarkable level of violent language, the number of recorded threats against members of Congress increased more than tenfold, to 9,625 in 2021, according to figures from the Capitol Police, the federal law enforcement department that protects Congress. In the first quarter of 2022, the latest period for which figures were available, the force opened 1,820 cases. If recent history is any guide, the pace is likely to surge in the coming weeks as the election approaches.
Despite the torrent of threats, few cases result in arrest. A spokesman for the Capitol Police said officers have made “several dozen” arrests — but fewer than 100 — in response to threats against members of Congress over the last three years, adding that the majority come from people with mental illness who are not believed to pose an immediate danger.
“The goal is to de-escalate this behavior,” said Tim Barber, the spokesman. “Most of the time getting mental health treatment may be more successful than jail in order to keep everyone safe. When we don’t believe that is plausible, or the threat is serious and imminent, we make an arrest.”
In a review by The New York Times this year of threats that resulted in indictments, more than a third were made by Republican or pro-Trump individuals against Democrats or Republicans deemed insufficiently loyal to the former president, and nearly a quarter were by Democrats targeting Republicans. In other cases, the party affiliation could not be determined.
Security concerns have grown so pressing that many members of Congress are dipping into their own official or campaign accounts to protect themselves. They have spent a total of more than $6 million on security since the start of last year, according to an analysis by The Times of campaign finance and congressional data.
The data suggest that the threats are particularly acute against lawmakers of color — Hispanic, Black, Asian American and Pacific Islander and Native American — who outspent their white colleagues on security by an average of more than $17,500. Democrats spent about $9,000 more than Republicans did. And members of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault spent over $5,000 more than the average amount spent by members of Congress as a whole.
Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, who has been a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s verbal attacks, spent more than any other Republican in the House, according to the data, pouring close to $70,000 into security measures since the Capitol riot.
Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, who has spoken out about the death threats she has received as a Black woman on Capitol Hill, spent the most in the House: close to $400,000.
That number pales in comparison to that of Senator Raphael Warnock, Democrat of Georgia, one of only two Black men in the Senate and the highest spender in Congress. He has doled out nearly $900,000 for his own protection since being sworn in in 2021; Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, was the second highest spender, at nearly $600,000.
Harsh and even menacing criticism of members of Congress is nothing new, but violent acts toward lawmakers were, until recently, a relatively rare phenomenon. In 2011, a gunman shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords, then a Democratic congresswoman from Arizona, outside a supermarket near Tucson where she was meeting constituents. In 2017, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, then the No. 3 Republican, was shot at a congressional baseball practice in a suburb of Washington, D.C., by a man with a grudge against Republicans.
Now, as threats rise in frequency and become more violent, many lawmakers say they feel vulnerable both in Washington and in their districts.
Security on the grounds of the Capitol, which has long been fortified by barricades, metal detectors and checkpoints guarded by a phalanx of police officers, has only increased in the wake of the Jan. 6 assault. But while the House and Senate leaders have their own security details, including plainclothes officers and armored vehicles, it can be more difficult for rank-and-file lawmakers to obtain such protection, even when they are facing serious threats.
Many members of Congress say the process of getting extra support from the Capitol Police has been opaque and inconsistent.
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It took two and a half years for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who is among the most threatened members of the House, to receive additional security from the Capitol Police, she said in an interview. The decision was made after the department flagged a tweet that it found to be threatening toward her.
“When I saw what it was, I was like, ‘I’ve gotten so much worse,’” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “Why now?”
She said her office can hardly keep up with the “astronomical” amount of threats she receives in a day — more than any other member except House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California and Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, according to what party leaders have told her. The onus is on the aides who answer the phones in her office — some as young as 19 — to determine what constitutes a threat.
So Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has taken matters into her own hands. Her office has a daily morning routine of creating a document with photos of the men who have made threats against the congresswoman, so that she can recognize and avoid or report them. Since 2021, she has spent more than $120,000 on security services, according to the data analyzed by The Times.
According to the Capitol Police, the department follows the Supreme Court definition of a threat, which is “statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”
The force declined to disclose how it decides which members get additional protection.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said the system is unfair to less-senior members, including women and people of color, who face serious threats and have less means to pay for protection.
“You are now extra tasked with providing and coming up with your own financial resources for your own safety,” she said.
The Capitol Police has struggled to adjust to the rise in threats, rushing in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 assault to ramp up its response amid severe strains on the department. J. Thomas Manger, the Capitol Police chief, testified in January that his force needed to double the number of agents who work threat cases against lawmakers.
A police spokesman said the department had met that goal.
The department has since opened two field offices in Florida and California, which have the most threats against members of Congress. It also has hired a new intelligence director tasked with improving data collection and sharing. And it now provides security assessments on members’ homes and district offices.
Still, the potential for violence has continued to mount.
“We sign up for a lot of things when we sign up for this job,” Ms. Jayapal said in an interview. “But having someone show up to your door with a gun, scaring your neighbors, scaring your staff, and clearly trying to intimidate me — it’s hard to describe.”
The Washington Democrat, who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, had grown accustomed to verbal harassment. But starting in April, she began receiving visits from a man in a car who would yell obscenities in the direction of her house.
Brett Forsell, 49, had sent Ms. Jayapal a “nasty” but “well thought-out” email back in January, which made clear that he disagreed with her, she said, but gave little indication that he intended to confront or harm her. Then around 11 p.m. one night in July — the third time he had come to her neighborhood — Mr. Forsell returned, revving his car engine, making U-turns in her street and parking near her driveway.
Ms. Jayapal’s husband, who took video of the encounter, reported hearing two male voices shouting obscenities and suggesting that they would stop harassing the neighborhood if the representative killed herself.
Mr. Forsell was arrested, and police reports said he planned to obtain a semiautomatic assault rifle and continue to return to Ms. Jayapal’s residence until she “goes back to India.” He pleaded not guilty in August and was ordered to pay $150,000 bail and submit to GPS monitoring to ensure he stayed away from Ms. Jayapal.
After the incident, she said it was a struggle to get the Capitol Police to grant her additional protection.
“It took an enormous amount of pressure for me to feel like I was getting attention from Capitol Police,” Ms. Jayapal said.
She now has round-the-clock protection from the Capitol Police, but says the sound of loud cars in her neighborhood still strikes fear in her. When she is home, Ms. Jayapal constantly checks her phone, which has been programmed to alert her if Mr. Forsell comes within 1,000 feet of her, and plans her driving routes to avoid his neighborhood.
The incident transformed Ms. Jayapal into something of an activist on congressional security. She requested a caucus-wide meeting about the issue, which took place over the summer. And the congresswoman has been pushing for additional funding for extreme threats and information and resources about how best to secure one’s home and more transparency from the Capitol Police, who conduct threat assessments on members of Congress but do not share all the details with the members, she said.
In the case of Ms. Collins, the incident at her home was a notable escalation after years of verbal threats. In 2018, after she announced she would support the confirmation of Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, she received a message that included footage of a since-deleted video of a beheading.
“We will c-t off your l-mbs and sl-ce off yo-r faces. We will t-ar out your tongues and dism-mber your org-as and sl-t your thro-ts while you watch,” the letter read.
It contained her personal phone numbers and addresses, as well as those of her staff and their relatives of her staff.
Three people are currently in jail and another few are awaiting some kind of action as a result of threats against her, Ms. Collins said.
The window-smashing incident was of particular concern, she said, because it occurred on a secluded side of her house, suggesting that the area had been “studied and chosen.”
“There’s been a sea change in that we now see this constant escalation and erosion of any boundaries of what is acceptable behavior, and it has crossed over into actual violence,” Ms. Collins said.
In July, the House sergeant-at-arms, the chamber’s top law enforcement official, announced it would provide an additional $10,000 for members to harden their homes against security breaches.
Still, some lawmakers say they continued to feel unsafe.
“It just feels like money was thrown at the situation,” said Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. “I just don’t know how seriously people are going to take this unless someone gets hurt.”
Catie Edmondson and Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.
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