The DOJ’s Abortion Civil Rights Violations

In May, Paulette Harlow, a 75-year-old grandmother, was sentenced to two years in prison for a civil disobedience protest at a D.C. abortion clinic.

In September, Amber Smith-Stewart was sentenced to 30 days in prison for pro-abortion attacks on a pregnancy center. She and her two co-defendants had been tied to attacks on three pregnancy centers in Florida during which threatening messages such as “If abortions aren’t safe than niether are you” and “YOUR TIME IS UP!!” had been scrawled on them that were linked to the wave of nationwide attacks by the pro-abortion Jane’s Revenge terror group.

Harlow was sentenced for what the Biden-Harris Department of Justice described as “a conspiracy that created a blockade” of the abortion clinic doors. Generally this is known as civil disobedience, but the FACE Act turned abortion clinics into ‘first amendment free zones’ where people can spend years in prison for doing the same things other protesters get away with.

However the FACE Act equally applies to the pregnancy centers attacked by Jane’s Revenge in the aftermath of the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade as unconstitutional.

Despite the FBI’s nationwide armed raids on the homes of pro-life protesters, there have been virtually no arrests in the dozens of attacks on pregnancy centers by pro-abortion activists.

The arrests of Smith-Stewart and her three co-defendants were the sole exception and ended in sentences of a month in prison for the two women, and a year in prison for Caleb Freestone: the male defendant. That’s in sharp contrast to the years in prison typically dispensed to Harlow and the average pro-life protester prosecuted under the FACE Act. Lauren Handy, one of the female protesters at the D.C. abortion clinic, was sentenced to nearly 5 years in prison.

While the Department of Justice aggressively employs the Freedom of Access or FACE Act against pro-life protesters, it selectively fails to enforce it against pro-abortion activists. And on the rare occasion when it does, the two-tier political system of enforcement quickly kicks in.

Rather than respecting the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization which ended the fictitious legal claim of a constitutional abortion right, Attorney General Merrick Garland and top Biden-Harris DOJ officials responded by announcing the creation of the Reproductive Rights Task Force. Rather than enforcing the FACE Act without any political considerations, the task force was specifically geared to empower abortion.

“Dobbs dealt a devastating blow to reproductive freedom,” Acting Associate Attorney General Benjamin C. Mizer, who established the RRTF task force, argued. “We established the Reproductive Rights Task Force to bring a whole-of-department approach to protecting access to reproductive health care following Dobbs.”

The explicit linkage of the Dobbs decision to the task force was an admission that the DOJ’s mission was to specifically protect abortion and not anything else in violation of the FACE Act.

In a summer press release, RRTF bragged that “since January 2021, the Department has brought 25 cases involving a total of 57 defendants accused of criminal FACE Act-related violations.” During this same period there were over 20 attacks on pregnancy centers. These attacks ranged from firebombings to death threats to vandalism. They included attacks on churches which are also illegal under the FACE Act and liable to federal prosecution.

Despite that, the FBI did not make a single arrest until it was faced with congressional hearings by the new GOP majority. It did however have the time and resources to send two dozen armed agents to arrest a pro-life protester accused in a shoving incident at an abortion clinic.

FBI Director Wray testified that “probably in the neighborhood of 70% of our abortion-related violence cases or threats cases are cases of violence or threats against… pro-life organizations. And we’re going after that through our joint terrorism task forces, through our criminal authorities, FACE Act and things like that.”

And yet out of 57 defendants only 4 were pro-abortion while 53 were pro-life which means that while 70% of cases involve attacks on pro-life groups but 92% of defendants are pro-life.

Only 7% of the DOJ’s FACE Act defendants are related to 70% of the cases while 92% are related to 30% of the cases. This is a completely illegal bias displayed in hard numbers.

It gets even worse because while the average pro-life defendant received a multi-year prison sentence, all the pro-abortion defendants got far lighter sentences.

After the sentencing of Lauren Handy to nearly 5 years in prison for civil disobedience, an FBI official falsely claimed that “the FBI and our judicial system will not tolerate the obstruction of civil rights.” In fact the FBI is dedicated to the violation of civil rights with a two-tier system.

After two years and at least twenty incidents of pro-abortion violence by a national network, the FBI and the Department of Justice did virtually nothing to arrest and indict the majority of the perpetrators. And while bias can be hard to prove, press releases by the DOJ task force and statements by top DOJ officials make it clear that its mission is pro-abortion, not pro-justice.

The language of DOJ officials including Attorney General Merrick Garland and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta shows that rather than enforcing the FACE Act as it’s written, they have invented a new pro-abortion FACE Act and are enforcing that instead.

Garland and Gupta have defined the mission of the task force as protecting “reproductive freedom”, but the FACE Act protects “freedom of access” to clinics, whether pro-abortion or pro-life as well as to churches and synagogues. Replacing freedom of access with reproductive freedom has allowed the DOJ to enforce a law that they invented rather than one that exists.

The DOJ task force’s mission is not to enforce the FACE Act but to protect abortion. By turning over FACE Act enforcement to a pro-abortion task force, the Biden-Harris administration and its DOJ ensured the civil rights violations proceeding from systemically unequal enforcement.

What is at stake in the civil rights abuses of the Biden-Harris administration and the Department of Justice goes beyond personal opinions on abortion. A politicized justice system is the first and foremost threat to civil rights. The politically selective interpretation of laws leads to a two-tier justice system in which the political agendas of those in power become the only law.

The FACE Act was already inherently unconstitutional because the intent behind it was to criminalize protests by one particular political movement against another. While civil disobedience is illegal and may deserve some punishment, a system under which members of one political movement engaging in civil disobedience receive 5 years in prison while members of another usually get an easily dismissed misdemeanor is traditional form of political repression and not any fundamentally different than the legal systems of Russia, China or Cuba.

The only thing that kept the FACE Act from being the modern equivalent of WWI’s Sedition Act and other legislation that liberals used to abhor before they gained power and embraced their use was that the bias was in the agenda behind it rather than in the text. The DOJ’s selective enforcement of the FACE Act however has made it a full blown unconstitutional abomination.

The DOJ and the FBI had the opportunity after the Dobbs decision and the attacks by Jane’s Revenge to show that they could be trusted to fairly enforce the law despite their personal politics and the only thing that they demonstrated was that their politics are the law.

And if you doubt that, ask the pro-life activists being sentenced to years in prison or, better yet, ask the pro-abortion activists getting off with a slap on the wrist. You’ll only have to wait 30 days.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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