The Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating potential violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and the “KKK Act” after anti-ICE protesters stormed a church in Minnesota on Sunday.
The move is a stark departure from the authoritarian Biden DOJ, which used the same federal laws to prosecute and imprison nearly two dozen peaceful pro-life activists, including an 89-year-old communist concentration camp survivor, several grandmothers, and a Christian father of 11.
Anti-ICE protesters stormed Cities Church in Minneapolis and accused the pastor of being a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent. In a live YouTube video recorded by former CNN host Don Lemon, protesters were seen occupying the church and chanting, “Hands up, Don’t shoot,” and “ICE out.” Lemon was heard clarifying on video that he was “not part of the group” and that he was just there “photographing.”
Jonathan Parnell, the lead pastor, described the protest as “unacceptable,” adding that it is “shameful to interrupt a public gathering of Christians in worship.”
“The @CivilRights is investigating the potential violations of the federal FACE Act by these people desecrating a house of worship and interfering with Christian worshippers,” Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon said in a post to X on Sunday evening.
The FACE Act is a 1994 law that “prohibits the use or threat of force and physical obstruction that injures, intimidates, or interferes with a person seeking to obtain or provide reproductive health services or to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship.” The act was written to equally protect abortion clinics, pro-life pregnancy resource centers, and churches; however, data indicates 97 percent of FACE Act cases since the law’s inception have been against pro-life advocates.
The Biden administration is responsible for prosecuting more than a quarter of all FACE Act cases, with the DOJ aggressively pursuing cases against pro-life activists in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned the invented constitutional right to abortion. Biden’s DOJ targeted pro-life activists even though pregnancy resource centers and churches experienced more than 100 attacks, including vandalisms and fire-bombings, in the wake of a leak of the Dobbs decision.
In several cases, the Biden administration would add on a “conspiracy against rights” charge, also known as the “KKK Act,” which would significantly bolster potential sentencing time. Some pro-life activists faced 11 years behind bars for peacefully protesting the slaughtering of unborn babies in abortions, although President Donald Trump ultimately pardoned more than 20 of them when he began his second term.
The conspiracy against rights statute was passed in 1870 after the Civil War, when “members of the Ku Klux Klan… terrorized black citizens for exercising their right to vote, running for public office, and serving on juries,” according to the U.S. Senate’s website. In response, Congress passed a series of statutes “to end such violence and empower the president to use military force to protect African Americans.”
Conspiracy against rights specifically “makes it unlawful for two or more persons to agree to injure, threaten, or intimidate a person in the United States in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured by the Constitution or laws of the United States or because of his or her having exercised such a right,” according to the DOJ.
RELATED: President Donald Trump Pardons Over 20 Pro-Life Activists Targeted by Biden DOJ
“We will pursue charges in this case. I see various crimes that have occurred — exactly what they are, I’m not going to flag, but the FACE Act has been mentioned as one of the predicates there. In other cases, the Biden, DOJ used the Klan Act conspiracy charges tacked onto the FACE Act in the case of protests outside abortion clinics to bring much longer sentences,” Dhillon said during an interview on “The Benny Show.”
“So there are a number of tools available to us. Who funded this? What other crimes may have occurred? Was there a use of the wires or the mail in preparing for this event? Did anyone cross state lines to do this? All of those are potential predicates for additional federal charges,” she added.
Dhillon has said the DOJ is looking at charging Lemon for his involvement in the incident. Lemon himself has denied involvement in organizing the protest.
“So some of these folks who did this have self-identified. Don Lemon himself has come out and said he knew exactly what was going to happen inside that facility. He went into the facility and then he began, ‘committing journalism’ — as if that’s sort of a shield from being an embedded part of a criminal conspiracy. It isn’t,” Dhillon told Johnson.
“We’re getting our ducks in a row. We’re putting the facts together, and this is a very serious matter,” Dhillon continued.
“Come next Sunday, nobody should think in the United States that they’re going to be able to get away with this. Everyone in the protest community needs to know that the fullest force of the federal government is going to come down and prevent this from happening and put people away for a long, long time,” she said.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
