Elon Musk’s secret weapon: the US Marshals Service

As if Elon Musk didn’t already have enough advantages, between his billions and his leverage over President Donald Trump, he appears to have another ace up his sleeve: the US Marshals Service.

In February, members of Musk’s private security detail were deputized by the Marshals Service, the enforcement and security arm of the federal judiciary, giving them federal law enforcement powers. On top of that, Musk appears to have some of the agency’s career staffers looking out for him: After an official at his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) complained that too many January 6 defendants were still in jail, a marshal reportedly prodded judges to release them faster.

That’s not the only way Musk’s relationship to the marshals has raised eyebrows. In March, the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that marshals helped DOGE barge into a small federal agency that Musk wanted to dismantle. “I will admit to being a little unnerved,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said in a segment afterward. The suggestion that federal law enforcement officers had turned against another federal agency seemed so strange that it caused Maddow to wonder whether the press had bad information: “We have reason to question whether the men reported as US marshals, now in multiple press accounts, are actually US marshals in the usual sense,” she said.

Maddow didn’t elaborate on who else the men might be—maybe Musk’s private security officers, the ones who’d been deputized. Could they and the regular marshals be wielding their law enforcement powers in ways that are less about public safety and more about furthering Musk’s personal agenda? And what kind of oversight exists to keep them in line?

Nailing down answers to these questions is a challenge. The Justice Department wouldn’t comment when Maddow’s team asked about the identity of the men. And at least one nonprofit watchdog is suing after its Freedom of Information Act requests about DOGE and the Marshals Service were ignored.

Some of the confusion may stem from the fact that the Marshals Service is not an especially well known agency, making it harder for the general public to gauge whether its officers are acting within the scope of their normal duties by helping Musk. Neither the Justice Department nor White House spokespeople responded to my questions for this story, so I turned to former deputy marshals and other experts to try to understand what’s going on. Here’s what you should know.

What is the US Marshals Service, and what does it normally do?  

For many people, the term “marshals” conjures Hollywood portrayals like Tommy Lee Jones chasing down a fugitive in the 1998 action flick US Marshals, or Wild West mythology about lawmen like Wyatt Earp trying to bring order to an unruly American frontier. But chasing escaped criminals is only a fraction of what the marshals do on a daily basis.

The Marshals Service, which was established in 1789 when President George Washington signed the Judiciary Act into law, is the country’s oldest federal law enforcement agency and has handled a wide array of responsibilities over the centuries, according to historian Michael Green at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In the beginning there were 13 marshals, one for each federal district, and their main task was to enforce court orders, though they also took the census and collected taxes. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln hired marshal Ward Hill Lamon as his bodyguard. Decades later, marshals registered and arrested immigrant Germans during World War I, enforced Prohibition in the 1920s, and provided security to Black students desegregating schools in the 1960s. They oversaw the witness protection program in the ‘70s, established the 15 Most Wanted Fugitive Program in the ‘80s, and helped secure airports after September 11.

Today, there are 94 marshals around the country, all appointed by the US president. They manage thousands of deputy marshals, the boots-on-the-ground officers who still apprehend fugitives and run the witness protection program, and whose main job is still to enforce judicial orders and provide security for courts. As part of that, deputy marshals watch out for federal judges and magistrates, preserve order during hearings, and transport prisoners.

What does it mean that members of Musk’s security detail were deputized?

The Marshals Service regularly deputizes people outside the agency—often local or state cops—to help with specific tasks for a set period of time. These deputized officers are known as special deputy marshals, and they usually have the power to make federal arrests, execute search warrants, serve subpoenas, and carry firearms in federal buildings, just like regular deputy marshals do. In January, 11,000 special deputy marshals provided extra security for Trump’s inauguration in DC.

In February, CNN reported that members of Musk’s private security detail had been deputized, too. Details were scarce; it was unclear how many members of his team got the additional powers and what their credentials were. They “may have needed to be deputized because they are entering areas where Elon is going to be, such as the White House grounds,” says Robert Ledogar, who worked as a supervisory deputy marshal in New York until 2020.

According to Marshals Service policy, a person is eligible for deputation if they’re employed by a federal, state, local, or tribal law enforcement agency or another agency approved by the Justice Department; have at least one year of law enforcement experience; and undergo basic training. Private security officers may be deputized, too, though they generally do not have arrest authority.

Musk is not the only high-level official to be assisted by special deputy marshals. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who advised the government during the coronavirus pandemic, had a security team that included deputy marshals from the Marshals Service and special deputy marshals from the Department of Health and Human Services. “They pulled marshals to stay on him 24/7, even when he was not working for the government anymore,” says Ledogar, noting that the HHS staffers needed to be deputized so they could investigate threats against Fauci. (Trump revoked Fauci’s security in January.)

The Marshals Service also provided security for Betsy DeVos, Trump’s former secretary of education, and deputy marshals regularly look out for Supreme Court justices. “There were times we’d have to take Justice Sotomayor to a Yankees game,” Ledogar says.

So, what’s strange about the situation with Musk?

Even though federal policy allows the Marshals Service to deputize private actors, it’s rare for the agency to do so. The former USMS officers I spoke with had never witnessed it happening. All the special deputy marshals that Ledogar interacted with were from law enforcement agencies like the NYPD. “It’d be unusual to deputize someone who wasn’t a law enforcement officer or didn’t have the law enforcement experience required,” says James Meissner, who became a special deputy marshal while working with the US Coast Guard after September 11.

Historians point out that the Marshals Service did deputize private actors during the Wild West era; deputy marshal Virgil Earp granted powers to his brother’s friend John Henry Holliday, or Doc Holliday, the dentist who shot up cowboys at the OK Corral in 1881. But “deputizing purely private actors” is “not really a thing that’s been done in the 21st century or the 20th century,” says David Noll, a professor at Rutgers Law School who studies private enforcement of the law.

Ledogar, a self-proclaimed Musk fan, said he had confidence that Musk’s private security officers had enough prior law enforcement experience to work as special deputy marshals. Other experts I spoke with expressed concern. “If you have a private security force that is exercising the power of the marshals, you have to start worrying about whether they are acting in the public interest and whether they understand the rules that apply to marshals,” Noll says.

“The risk to people’s civil rights is enormous,” adds Jonathan Smith, who helped lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division during the Obama administration, investigating law enforcement agencies. Generally when private actors gain policing power, “there are real questions about who they’re accountable to and what rules they’re going to play by.”

Last year, a federal audit showed that the Marshals Service had not consistently documented misconduct allegations against special deputy marshals. The audit, which covered fiscal years 2020 to 2023, also found that the agency lacked policies to ensure all special deputy marshals met program requirements. Biden officials said they were responding to the problems exposed by the audit, but it’s unclear whether those fixes remain in place under Trump. “Without adequate policies, controls, and oversight processes, there is an increased risk that the USMS will provide law enforcement authority to ineligible individuals for unauthorized purposes,” the auditors at the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General wrote.

Lauren Bonds, executive director of the nonprofit National Police Accountability Project, recalls instances of deputations gone wrong. In 2020 during Trump’s first term, the city of Portland, Oregon, filed a lawsuit alleging that the Marshals Service unlawfully deputized dozens of Portland police—despite objections by city officials—to respond to racial justice protests after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. (The lawsuit was dismissed after Trump left office and the Biden administration agreed to resolve the case without litigation.) In another lawsuit, the ACLU accused agents from the Marshals Service and the Homeland Security Department of wrongdoing during those same protests, including indiscriminately using tear gas and rubber bullets against journalists and legal observers. (A judge declared the case moot against the federal government after Trump left office and protests died down, and the city of Portland recently paid the injured plaintiffs in a settlement.)

Under Trump, what have the marshals been up to?

In addition to deputizing Musk’s private security, the Marshals Service and its regular officers appear to be helping Musk, an unelected figure whose DOGE is arguably not an official government agency, downsize the federal government in other ways.

In early March, DOGE staffers and Pete Marocco, the State Department official in charge of foreign aid, threatened to call the Marshals Service when employees of the US African Development Foundation, a small agency they were hoping to dismantle, would not let them inside the agency’s headquarters in DC. A day later, they returned with five marshals in tow and successfully gained entry, changing the locks to keep the agency’s leaders out. USADF’s president then sued DOGE, Trump, and other administration officials in an attempt to keep the agency intact.

The incident set off alarm bells. “Usually you don’t see the marshals being used against different parts of the federal government,” says Noll, the Rutgers professor. “There’s some question of whether it falls under the marshals’ duties,” adds Green of the University of Nevada. “You have an extragovernmental agency assigning marshals to do something that’s questionable in the first place.”

Later that week, the marshals popped up in the news again. The Justice Department announced more firings of career officials in DC, and it put two federal prosecutors on leave who had worked on the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Trump ally. Those prosecutors were walked out of the building by none other than US marshals. Once again, it seemed, Trump officials were turning to the law enforcement agency as the muscle to oust federal employees.

Other law enforcement appear to have been roped into Musk’s work, too. In late March, DC police escorted DOGE staffers into the US Institute of Peace, another agency they’re dismantling. (The Institute is suing DOGE, Trump, and other administration officials as well.) “For the first time in a very, very long time, street level police officers have to ask themselves whether they’re being told to do something that is itself lawful,” Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University, who was previously a DC reserve police officer, told NPR. “I don’t think they can fully trust the politically appointed people who are giving them direction, which places them in a really impossible position.”

On top of all that, Musk’s influence seems to be seeping into federal court proceedings. In January, DOGE reached out to the Marshals Service to “express concern” that judges weren’t acting quickly enough to release Jan. 6 defendants, according to the Washington Post; DOGE added that if the releases did not come faster, there could be protests at the federal courthouse in DC.

After that, the acting marshal in charge of security at the DC courthouse went to the chambers of at least four judges to check on the status of Jan. 6 cases and explain the possibility of protests. The incident “astonished and angered a number of judges,” the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus reported. One judge told Marcus that DOGE’s attempt to influence the judiciary via the marshals was “beyond the pale.”

“We’ve never seen anything like this before—pressuring the court to issue a decision by a certain time,” the judge added. Ledogar, the former supervisory deputy marshal in New York, told me that USMS personnel are supposed to communicate with judges about courthouse security, “but as far as speaking about working faster, that is totally out of the normal.” 

“It strikes me as a moblike tactic, to get to the people who are responsible for protecting judges and use them to ‘send a message’ to judges that the president would like them to rule in a certain way,” Noll says.

Why should judges—and the rest of us—care about marshals’ allegiances?

Judges aren’t just angry about DOGE trying to influence their decisions; they are also afraid for their safety right now.

“For judges to feel secure, they have to have confidence in the people protecting them,” Smith says. “To convert the Marshals Service away from that neutral function of protecting is very troubling; we’re breaking down the various functions that agencies have and turning them toward whatever the current will of the president and his minions are.”

The federal judiciary is facing an unusually high number of violent threats, according to a Reuters report, as Trump administration allies badmouth judges for legal decisions. In dozens of social media posts since January, Musk himself has referred to them as “corrupt,” “radical,” and “evil.” Some judges have even been identified by name in viral posts calling for their impeachment, such as US District Judge Amir Ali, who ruled in February that the Trump administration must resume foreign aid payments. Someone on X, Musk’s social media site, suggested that Ali be beheaded, and another person asked “why so few judges are hanged.”

“The consequences are, quite starkly, that we’re going to get a judge killed if we’re not careful,” John Jones III, a former US district judge in Pennsylvania, told Reuters. (The Trump administration said it had no position on whether judges should be impeached and that Musk was posting in his personal capacity. “The White House condemns any threats to really any public officials, despite our feelings that a lot of these people are leftist, crazy judges that aren’t following the Constitution,” spokesperson Harrison Fields told the news agency.)

Some experts question whether the politicization of the marshals could have constitutional implications. That’s because the marshals have another important job: arresting defendants who are held in contempt of court for repeatedly refusing to follow judges’ orders.

What happens if that defendant is Trump himself, or Musk, or another administration official? The Marshals Service “plays a critical role in enforcing court orders, which couldn’t be more important as the courts continue to serve as a bulwark against the Trump administration’s abuses of power,” Skye Perryman, who leads the watchdog group Democracy Forward, said in a statement after suing for information about the marshals’ recent activity. “The American people deserve for the USMS to fulfill its role protecting their interests, not for it to act as the personal security force in DOGE and Elon Musk’s campaign of government overreach.”