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I founded and built the largest grassroots movement in the history of the pro-life cause: 40 Days for Life. During its first decade, I mobilized more than 2,000 leaders and 750,000 volunteers in peaceful prayer outside abortion facilities across all 50 states and dozens of other countries. These, and others like them, are exactly the people the Biden Justice Department decided to hunt and criminalize.
In early April, President Donald Trump DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group released an explosive 882-page report built on more than 700,000 internal records. It confirms what pro-life Americans suspected all along: The Justice Department of the United States worked hand-in-hand with the National Abortion Federation, Planned Parenthood, and the Feminist Majority Foundation to spy on, build secret files against and prosecute peaceful pro-life citizens.
Here is the stark reality the report lays out. When pro-life Americans were charged under the law, the Biden DOJ asked judges to send them to prison for more than twice as long as the people who firebombed and vandalized pregnancy centers and churches. Fifteen pro-lifers were prosecuted for every pro-abortion offender. A grandmother praying her rosary on a sidewalk was treated as more dangerous to the country than an arsonist throwing a firebomb through the window of a pregnancy center.
In May 2022, the Supreme Court’s draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade leaked to the public. A group calling itself Jane’s Revenge promised a “summer of rage” if Roe fell. The left delivered. Ninety-six pregnancy resource centers and 393 Catholic churches were firebombed, vandalized or threatened.
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Statues of Our Lady were beheaded. Doors were set on fire during Mass. “If abortions aren’t safe, then neither are you” was painted on the walls of nonprofits staffed by volunteer women offering free ultrasounds, diapers and support to pregnant neighbors. The Department of Justice had been warned yet did nothing.
The same department sent a SWAT team into 40 Days for Life volunteer Mark Houck’s home at dawn, assault weapons drawn, in front of his wife and seven children. Thanks to the legal work of the Thomas More Society, a jury acquitted him. The judge overseeing the case said the law was being “stretched a little thin.” It had been stretched past the breaking point, and the DOJ knew it.
The new report reveals a task force inside the Civil Rights Division, led by Sanjay Patel, that built secret files on pro-life advocates who had not been charged with anything at all. Some of those files contained photographs of the targets’ children. Patel and at least three other prosecutors who ran the program were properly fired. Trump pardoned many of those wrongly convicted on his second day in office. The repair work has begun but is not finished.
I have spent my adult life working with these people. I have stood with Christians praying outside abortion centers in the rain. I have worked with pregnancy center directors whose staff were sleeping in shifts to guard their doors. I have prayed with pastors whose sanctuaries were defaced. The fear in that season was real, and the aggression from Washington made it worse.
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As grateful as we are for this revelation, we also understand that stopping the prosecutions does not finish the work. The Biden DOJ did not create the contempt for praying Christians and pregnancy centers inside our federal government. It revealed how widespread that contempt already is inside the institutions that train our lawyers, our reporters, our doctors and our federal prosecutors. A new administration can halt the abuse. It cannot, by itself, change the attitudes inside the law schools and newsrooms that produced a willing accomplice like Sanjay Patel in the first place.
We should never forget this dark chapter in our nation’s history. It was a season when people of faith and pro-life Americans had good reason to fear for their livelihoods, their reputations, their freedom and, in some cases, their very lives. Congress should investigate the coordination between federal prosecutors and pro-abortion advocacy groups and pass the reforms needed to prevent this from ever happening again.
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The FACE Act itself deserves a serious review. The pro-life Americans dragged through courtrooms and jail cells deserve to have their records cleared and their reputations fully restored. A long-overdue reckoning is owed to every official who wielded the Justice Department as a bludgeon against Americans whose only offense was defending human life.
The people who stood peacefully on those sidewalks never gave up on America, even when their government temporarily turned against them. We should not give up on the work of renewing our nation that was founded on the right to life.
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