For the past month, I’ve been in the streets of Minneapolis with my neighbors, standing up to the inhumane, violent and deadly tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It’s what we do.
I was born and raised in Minneapolis and still live there half the year. Although the ICE presence in our city is fresh, pushing back against extreme aggression is not new for me. For 10 years, I have run an abortion rights nonprofit organization. Part of our work is documenting the violence and intimidation tactics that extremist thugs perpetuate against doctors and employees of reproductive health care clinics.
As with filming ICE, it is important to capture such activity on video. That can mean recording activists’ own livestreams, which can show them trespassing on clinic property to impede patients’ access, or using phones to record them in person, in case they block the clinic entrance to prevent providers and patients from entering and exiting. If they’re caught on camera, that information can be turned over to law enforcement. If the evidence is solid, these terrifying people may be brought to justice under a federal law called the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.
President Bill Clinton signed the FACE Act into law in 1994 in the wake of real, relentless and deadly violence. Clinics were firebombed, doctors murdered, patients terrorized. Sadly, such atrocities continue today. With passage of the act, the penalties for attacking clinics and violating the law are hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and up to 10 years of jail time.
But conservatives didn’t think the fact that abortion clinics and patients were experiencing this violence was enough reason to get on board to pass FACE. So, to win their support, the authors of the bill agreed to some conservatives’ demand to extend these protections to places of worship as well.
It’s because of that addition to appease radical conservatives that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her goon squad at the Justice Department arrested independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort last week, charging them with civil rights conspiracy and violations of the FACE Act. Prosecutors allege they were unlawfully obstructing access to a place of worship that protesters had entered — even though Lemon and Fort were there to observe and report, as journalists do.
Let’s be clear. The FACE Act was never some vibes-based anti-protest law. It was always about protecting access to reproductive health care. Under FACE, Americans can still protest outside clinics (and they still do, all day, across this country). The law was intended to make clear that while engaging in such protests, no one can use force, threats or physical obstruction to stop someone from entering a building to get care or to intimidate them out of trying.
The Trump administration and Justice Department’s misuse of FACE to serve their agenda is something that abortion activists have warned about for years. We decried the abuse of FACE when the Justice Department used it to prosecute people for defacing Christian-based anti-abortion entities that push propaganda but are commonly called “crisis pregnancy centers.” We spoke out again when federal officials filed a lawsuit last year targeting pro-Palestinian activists at a New Jersey synagogue. That case cited the FACE Act, even though demonstrators were not protesting Jewish religious services but an event promoting the sale of property in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
We also noticed in the shadow of pardoning the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, President Donald Trump also pardoned 23 anti-abortion protesters who had been convicted under the FACE Act. Trump announced that the Justice Department would pull back enforcement at abortion clinics, saying it would pursue abortion-related FACE cases only in “extraordinary circumstances” or when there were “significant aggravating factors.”
All of this history is relevant now that the Justice Department is weaponizing FACE against journalists for covering an action of civil disobedience that happened in a Minnesota church.
Let’s be clear. The charges against Lemon and Fort are not about appropriately using the part of the FACE Act that protects religious establishments. This is about selective enforcement of the law for political retribution.
Consider the lengths to which Trump’s Justice Department has gone just to bring FACE charges against these journalists. Prosecutors first sought arrest warrants in Minnesota, but Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko refused to sign them, citing a lack of probable cause. Federal prosecutors then appealed to Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz of the U.S. District Court in Minnesota, who declined to reverse Micko. Prosecutors pushed to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and got turned down there, too. Only after striking out in three courts did Justice Department officials pivot to a grand jury to secure the indictments.
If the government can treat journalists’ clear statements that “I’m here to film this” like a federal crime, it will chill every reporter’s instincts at the exact moment our society needs them most: when the government wants to operate in the dark and dare all of us to prove what happened.
The hypocrisy in how the law has been applied is clear: When the targets are abortion clinics, the Justice Department has narrowed enforcement, shrugged and looked the other way. But when the targets are protesters — and the journalists covering them — suddenly it’s all hands on deck.
It’s an outrage that a law created to protect abortion providers and patients is being twisted by the Trump administration into yet another weapon to punish the president’s perceived enemies.
