In a further effort to end the Biden-Harris administration’s weaponization of the government, the Trump administration announced it will “aggressively” prosecute acts of violence of vandalism against pro-life pregnancy resource centers and churches under a law regularly used to jail pro-life advocates. While pro-life experts welcome the change in orientation, they say the law should be repealed entirely.

The 1994 Federal Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, punishes anyone who “intentionally damages or destroys the property of a place of religious worship” or any facility “providing reproductive health services” with a $10,000 fine and up to six months in jail for a first conviction. Yet for 31 years, the law has been used almost exclusively against pro-life advocates, ignoring the spate of domestic terrorism plaguing pro-life pregnancy resource centers and churches.

“The only violence being done in recent years is to the law and to the rights of speech and of prayer of people of faith of people who want to pray … outside abortion facilities,” Assistant Attorney General for the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon told “The Glenn Beck Podcast” last Saturday. All facilities offering prenatal care, including pro-life pregnancy resource centers, “are protected by the FACE Act, and so we will be aggressively going after” vandals and violators of the law. “Those facilities have been violently attacked by activists with no action by law enforcement, federal or state.”

The Biden administration ignored attacks on churches. In all, Family Research Council scholar Arielle Del Turco documented 436 attacks against churches in just the first 11 months of 2023. The number of church attacks had increased 800% over six years. “There have been zero — zero — prosecutions under the FACE Act for that violence,” noted Erin Hawley, senior counsel and vice president at the Alliance Defending Freedom, at a hearing of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government last December. FRC noted 39 assaults specifically against pro-life churches in the five months between the leak of the Dobbs decision in May 2022 and that October.

Not including threats and other forms of harassment, FRC recorded 67 acts of violence and vandalism against pro-life pregnancy centers as of May 2023, and 24 attacks targeting pro-life organizations between Politico’s publication of the draft decision and the following January. 

“Since the start of the Biden-Harris administration until May 2024, the DOJ had brought a total of 24 FACE Act prosecutions against 55 defendants, with only two of these cases concerning attacks on pregnancy resource centers. To this day, the FACE Act has never been used in defense of a church since it was passed in 1994,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told the subcommittee, which he chairs.

The Trump administration has already taken action to protect houses of worship from being closed by hostile protesters. Anti-Israel activists blocked the entrance to the Adas Torah synagogue in Los Angeles last June. In March, President Trump’s Justice Department filed a statement of interest in the case, noting it did so “to promote the correct and uniform interpretation of [the FACE Act] protecting access to places of religious worship.” Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Mac Warner said, “Every person should be free to worship and attend religious services without fear of violence, threats, or intimidation,” adding that the Trump administration “is working vigorously to combat antisemitism using all of the tools at our disposal.”

“It’s great DOJ officials under Trump are committed to undoing the harms of the Biden administration’s unjust use of the FACE Act against peaceful pro-life protestors. We have also heard Trump administration officials commit to using the FACE Act in a more proper way, to fairly prosecute violent offenders regardless of political affiliation,” Del Turco, director of the Center for Religious Liberty at FRC, told The Washington Stand. “In the long run though, we need to repeal laws that are ripe for dangerous partisan weaponization, which is how the FACE Act has been used under past administrations. The FACE Act should be repealed so no future administration or radical judge can punish American citizens for peacefully expressing disfavored political or religious views.”

Rev. Jim Harden is the CEO of CompassCare, a PreBorn! Partner Pregnancy Clinic, which was among the facilities that were firebombed. “For three years, CompassCare has endured the valley of intense and ongoing battles against private activists and public bad actors simply so we can continue protecting the right to serve women and save babies from abortion,” Harden told TWS. “The recent promise to prosecute terrorist acts against Christian pro-life pregnancy centers like CompassCare from the new Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon feels like we are watching the reinforcements riding in.”

The Biden-Harris administration often conjoined the FACE Act penalties with felony charges under the “Conspiracy Against Rights” provision of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 to impose years of imprisonment on pro-life advocates. The Trump administration pardoned 23 pro-life advocates wrongfully imprisoned by the Biden-Harris administration and dropped three pending FACE Act prosecutions.

In January, the Trump administration announced it will only enforce the statute in “extraordinary circumstances” such as cases involving “death, serious bodily harm, or serious property damage,” wrote Chad Mizelle, chief of staff to the attorney general, in a January 24 memo to the Justice Department. “Cases not presenting significant aggravating factors can adequately be addressed under state or local law.”

In January, Roy, a pro-life stalwart, reintroduced the FACE Act Repeal Act (H.R. 589), legislation he previously introduced in 2023. In January, the Texas conservative told “Washington Watch” that, as long as it remains on the books, future Democratic administrations will use the FACE Act as “a political sword … a sword against pro-lifers.”

Harden noted that the Biden-Harris administration’s Assistant Attorney General Kristan Clarke was vehemently opposed to Christian pro-life pregnancy centers and was also pro-Antifa. “The hundreds of attacks on churches and pro-life pregnancy centers carry the fingerprints of Marxist Antifa that so commonly piggyback on left-wing causes (i.e. BLM, environmentalism, transgenderism, pro-Palestine movement, and abortion) designed to destabilize and undermine America’s constitutional rule of law,” Harden remarked. “This was not a grass-roots protest.”

In December 2023, the Biden administration solicited a guilty plea from Whitney M. Durant, a socialist activist who identifies as transgender and uses the name “Soren Monroe,” to violating the FACE Act when she spray painted defamatory statements such as “Abort God” and “LIARS” on HerChoice (also known as the Bowling Green Pregnancy Center) in the university town of Bowling Green, Ohio. Durant, who had previously assaulted a pro-life display, faced a year in prison, but last April Magistrate Judge Darrell A. Clay sentenced Durant to two years’ probation and a $2,000 fine.

“The primary belief held by Christian pro-lifers is the sacrosanct nature of the human person — as the Declaration of Independence recognizes, ‘we are endowed by our Creator’ not our government. If the truth of inherent human dignity is undermined, it opens the door for secular centralized government and the ability for that government to legalize systemic human rights abuses,” Harden emphasized.