For years, those of us who followed the Biden Justice Department’s enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act knew something was deeply wrong. We knew that administration enforced the statute disproportionately and unjustly against pro-life activists and people of faith. Pro-lifers—many of them peaceful sidewalk counselors, elderly nuns, and fathers praying the rosary outside abortion clinics—were being hauled into federal court while attacks on pregnancy resource centers went essentially uninvestigated.
A report released Tuesday by the current DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group in the Office of Legal Policy takes it to the next level, revealing just how calculated the Department was in this selective targeting of Americans based on their viewpoints.
The report runs almost 900 pages with exhibits and draws on a review of more than 700,000 internal records to lay out in devastating detail how the Biden DOJ turned a federal statute into an ideological weapon aimed squarely at people of faith and pro-life conviction.
Recall what the FACE Act actually says. Passed in 1994, the law prohibits the use of force, threat of force, or physical obstruction to prevent individuals from obtaining or providing reproductive health services or trying to exercise their First Amendment rights at a place of worship. The statute cuts both ways: It is supposed to protect pregnancy resource centers and places of religious worship from precisely the same conduct. Those protections, proposed in an amendment by Senator Hatch, were likely crucial for the bipartisan passage of the bill. But the Biden DOJ under Attorney General Merrick Garland revived a task force that weaponized the FACE Act, the report observes, by enforcing only one side of this congressional compromise. Senior leadership in the Department and members of the task force “provided extensive support to abortion clinics” while “the Biden DOJ often ignored and downplayed vandalism and attacks against pregnancy resource centers or houses of worship.” Their skewed enforcement nullified the clear congressional intent to pass a bill that protected both sides of a heated debate from violence.
The centerpiece of the report details the cozy relationship between the Biden administration and pro-abortion groups—especially the National Abortion Federation (NAF), Planned Parenthood, and the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF)—that pushed targets for enforcement. These groups “monitored the activities and locations of pro-life activists and shared updates about their First Amendment activities with the Biden DOJ.” And the Biden task force “did not relent” even after the FBI flagged that the pro-abortion groups were tracking “1st Amendment protected activity.” Prior to a national Operation Save America event, NAF developed a resource guide for law enforcement that
broke down the schedule of events—including protests and meetings at local churches—before providing detailed dossiers of “anti-choice individuals” expected to attend, including pro-life pastors and speakers. These dossiers included significant amounts of personal identifying information, such as birthdates, addresses, contact information, physical descriptions and photographs, names of family and close associates (including photographs of minor children), affiliated groups, history of pro-life and faith-based activities, and drivers’ license numbers.
In other words, outside activist organizations capitalized on their relationship with the Biden DOJ “to gain internal information and push targets for FACE Act enforcement.” They were effectively co-directing federal prosecutions.
The key figure at the center of this arrangement was Sanjay Patel, an attorney with the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division and the director of the task force. At his request, “NGOs compiled evidence that ultimately gave rise to search warrants and charges.” Patel was on texting terms with Michelle Davidson, NAF’s security director, whom he described as an “MVP” at bringing incidents to his “attention, often in real-time, which usually result in an investigation/ prosecution.” He called her “a wonderful contact for me as it relates to FACE Act investigations.” This was not a neutral law enforcement relationship. It was a partnership—with one ideological side supplying the targets and the federal government supplying the prosecution.
The information flow ran the other way too: “When NAF requested a list of all active FACE charges, ‘including [crisis pregnancy centers] and churches,’ Patel sent a complete list back within the hour.” When NAF and FMF requested the terms of release for pro-life defendants, Patel and AUSAs shared them promptly, after which NAF distributed those terms to one of its email lists. Yet when defense counsel in United States v. Gallagher requested historical FACE Act prosecution data to prepare a selective prosecution defense, Patel told them he did not “keep the[se] kind of records.” The report flatly calls that representation “false.” He had the data on hand and had already shared “substantially identical information with NAF.”
The misconduct didn’t stop at the investigative stage. In United States v. Zastrow, prosecutors sought to identify and screen Christian jurors, searching for “an indirect way to get some more info about religion” while taking care not to expose pro-abortion jurors to similar scrutiny. One prosecutor complained that the arraignment had drawn “a very Catholic magistrate” who was “very particular about the bond conditions and not infringing on [defendants’] first amendment rights.” While drafting her rebuttal argument, another prosecutor described pro-life Christians as “culty.” That is not prosecution. That is persecution.
Consider the case of Mark Houck, a Catholic father of seven from rural Pennsylvania, who pushed a Planned Parenthood escort who had “confronted his son with ridicule and profanity.” Patel’s own supervisors “voiced concerns that the incident seemed unrelated to any intent to interfere with clinic access.” Houck’s attorneys offered to bring him in voluntarily, but DOJ would not allow self-surrender and deferred to the FBI’s arrest plan. Sixteen armed agents arrived in seven vehicles at Houck’s home at 7:03 a.m. and arrested and handcuffed him in front of his family. The jury acquitted him. DOJ later settled a civil claim arising from the prosecution. One AUSA’s reaction to public criticism of the arrest: “The tragedy is that Mrs. Houck is attempting to taint the public’s view of the arrest and prosecution.” What the Houck family endured was not an accident. It was deliberate policy.
The sentencing disparity tells the same story in numbers. For pro-life defendants, the Biden DOJ requested an average sentence of 26.8 months, compared to 12.3 months for pro-abortion defendants, pursuing sentences “near the top range of sentencing guidelines” for the former while seeking leniency for the latter. Meanwhile, the Biden DOJ largely ignored attacks on pregnancy resource centers in the first place, charging only five people under the FACE Act for vandalism against those pro-life facilities and no one for attacking a house of worship. And throughout all of this, Patel agreed to serve as a personal reference for NAF’s application for a large private grant, with “no record of ethics approval.” Moreover, “it is doubtful that the Biden DOJ could validly give any such ethical clearance for this conflict of interest.”
This is a stunning report. It confirms that the Biden DOJ did not merely enforce the law unevenly. It recruited ideological allies to surveil Americans engaged in constitutionally protected activity, built prosecution dossiers from activist tip sheets, withheld evidence from defendants while sharing it freely with their adversaries, stacked jury selection against people of faith, and rewarded its partners with grant references—all while the violence the FACE Act was designed to prevent went largely unpunished when directed at pro-life targets. Thanks to this report from the current DOJ, the egregious weaponization of government power against pro-lifers and people of faith is now a matter of public record.