DOJ’s Novel Use of Religious Statute in Minnesota Draws Scrutiny

Charges against protesters who interrupted a Minnesota church service are the latest example of the Justice Department’s selective enforcement of a law Trump administration officials have accused predecessors of weaponizing, former federal prosecutors said.

At least two of three individuals arrested Thursday in connection with the viral incident, where protesters targeted a pastor they said was an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, are facing alleged violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act, FBI Director Kash Patel wrote in a series of X posts.

The 1994 law largely prohibits violent and threatening conduct intended to interfere with the delivery or access to reproductive health services. The charges in Minnesota mark the first time DOJ has pursued a criminal case under a lesser-known provision of the FACE Act allowing penalties for the intimidation or interference of a person exercising their religious freedom at places of worship.

Top Trump DOJ officials, including Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon, have accused prior administrations of ignoring this provision while weaponizing the law against anti-abortion protesters charged with threatening patients and blocking access to reproductive health facilities.

Former DOJ attorneys said Dhillon’s focus on places of worship and anti-abortion pregnancy centers demonstrates unequal enforcement after President Donald Trump last year pardoned more than 20 individuals previously convicted under the FACE Act. That approach undermines the administration’s stated goal of ending politicized and targeted prosecutions, they said.

“This is obvious selective enforcement,” said Elizabeth Saxe, a former DOJ trial attorney who worked on Joe Biden-era FACE Act cases at the department and in private practice for roughly a decade prior.

“I can’t square criminal charges that are brought in a matter of days for activity that is milder than what the president pardoned and the department dismissed just last year against activists trying to shutter reproductive health clinics with any sort of even-handed, thoughtful enforcement of this law,” Saxe said.

DOJ representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Ending Weaponization

Dhillon, a former Republican Party official and campaign lawyer for Trump, has committed to advancing the Trump administration’s promise to end so-called weaponized prosecutions, including on the FACE Act.

Federal lawmakers developed the law after a series of large-scale clinic blockades and the murders of abortion providers. The provision on places of worship wasn’t included in the version first introduced in the Senate but was added later during negotiations.

The day after Trump issued pardons for anti-abortion protesters last January, DOJ issued a memo announcing that “future abortion-related FACE Act prosecutions and civil actions will be permitted only in extraordinary circumstances,” including death or serious bodily harm.

Dhillon claimed in a recent podcast interview that “the Biden administration was extremely active in persecuting people of faith protesting outside abortion clinics.”

“In all these years up until I was the assistant attorney general for civil rights, nobody ever used that houses of worship part to prosecute protesters or criminals blocking access to a house of worship, so we started to do that,” Dhillon said.

The places of worship provision typically received less attention, in part, because other tools exist to prosecute individuals interfering with acts of worship, said Laura-Kate Bernstein, a former trial attorney in the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division.

Among these is the Church Arson Prevention Act, which includes provisions related to the obstruction of a person exercising their religious beliefs.

“It’s not because nobody wanted to use the FACE Act to go after people who attack religious places of worship, but because it didn’t make sense to when we had this tool that was a much better fit,” Bernstein said.

In September, the division under Dhillon’s leadership filed a civil complaint under the FACE Act against individuals accused of engaging in threats of force, intimidation, and violent conduct directed at congregants at a New Jersey synagogue.

Conservative legal groups that have previously criticized the FACE Act say the law is now being used appropriately under the Trump administration.

“What happened in St. Paul in Minnesota this past weekend is clearly within the purview of the FACE Act,” said Zack Smith, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former prosecutor in the Northern District of Florida.

‘Differential Enforcement’

Attorneys who previously worked on FACE Act cases, including those dropped at the start of Trump’s second term, say DOJ has typically prioritized cases based on which had the best chance of success, and not based on who the defendants were.

Of the two criminal FACE Act cases Bernstein worked on under the Biden administration, one involved seven anti-abortion protesters convicted of blocking patients’ access to a reproductive health clinic in Detroit in 2020.

The other involved a group of protesters who spray painted threats onto Florida anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning the constitutional right to abortion.

Both cases “were treated on absolutely equal footing and we investigated the cases the same way,” Bernstein said.

Trump pardoned the individuals in the first case, but no one in connection with the second case.

The administration’s shift in focus with FACE Act cases “raises the question of whether the viewpoint of the protest is determining whether this administration will enforce the FACE Act at all,” said Maura Klugman, who served as deputy chief of the special litigation section at the Civil Rights Division under the Biden administration.

Klugman left the department in May 2025, just months after she was directed to drop three civil FACE Act lawsuits she helped lead.

“If there is differential enforcement of a statute,” Klugman said, “there are potential First Amendment problems.”