SHAPIRO: How Joe Biden’s justice department went after pro-lifers

Democrats have been weaponizing the administrative state for decades.

Published Apr 19, 2026  •  Last updated 30 minutes ago  •  5 minute read

Former U.S. President Joe Biden. Photo by Scott Eisen /Getty Images

We now know something the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden spent years denying: It wasn’t merely enforcing the law around abortion clinics, it was allegedly partnering with abortion activists to identify, track and ultimately prosecute pro-life Americans.

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And that should stop every honest person in their tracks.

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Because if we’re going to have a national conversation about presidents “attacking Catholics,” as the media suddenly seems eager to do whenever President Donald Trump so much as raises an eyebrow at the Vatican, then we should probably start with the administrations that actually used the machinery of government to target religious believers.

Start with former president Barack Obama, who famously tried to force the Little Sisters of the Poor — nuns who devote their lives to serving the elderly poor — to violate their religious conscience.

Then move to former president Biden, who, it now appears, went even further.

According to reporting from The Daily Wire, Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) relied on intelligence gathered from radical pro-abortion groups to monitor peaceful pro-life activists — people who had not yet been charged with any federal crime — and then build cases that ended with FBI arrests.

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Let that sink in.

The federal government was reportedly outsourcing its surveillance and investigative efforts to activist organizations that have a direct political and ideological stake in crushing the pro-life movement.

That’s not law enforcement. That’s a political operation.

The Daily Wire cites a DOJ report titled “The Biden Administration’s Weaponization of the FACE Act,” which examined more than 700,000 records. The FACE Act, of course, originally was intended to prevent physical obstruction of abortion clinic entrances. It was also meant to protect churches from disruption, a part of the law that the media rarely remembers exists until activists storm a sanctuary and decide worship services are an acceptable place to stage political theatre.

But what the DOJ report allegedly found was far more troubling than an overzealous application of a statute.

The records included dossiers on pro-life activists who had not been charged with federal crimes, but who were nevertheless treated as threats, largely because abortion groups flagged them as such.

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And if that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s exactly the pattern we’ve seen repeatedly from the modern Left: Government agencies using ideological “cut-out” organizations to do what the government isn’t supposed to do openly.

Whether it was the State Department floating efforts to pressure advertisers and throttle conservative media, or federal agencies leaning on private groups to police speech and shape narratives, the Biden administration developed a habit of laundering political targeting through “non-governmental” actors.

In other words, plausible deniability.

According to the report, much of the escalation traces back to former attorney general Merrick Garland’s decision to resurrect the National Task Force on Violence Against Reproductive Health Care Providers in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

That task force reportedly operated out of the DOJ Civil Rights Division under the direction of Sanjay Patel, who was fired this week. Patel, according to the DOJ report, was in direct communication with the National Abortion Federation’s security team and regularly coordinating with Planned Parenthood and the Feminist Majority Foundation.

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So, we’re not talking about vague ideological sympathies here.

We’re talking about open coordination between the federal government and the activist wing of the abortion industry.

And the numbers make the bias even harder to dismiss.

Daily Wire reporting compared sentencing requests and outcomes for pro-life defendants versus pro-abortion defendants. The Biden DOJ, they found, sought longer average sentences for pro-life activists and the final outcomes reflected that imbalance. Pro-life defendants received an average sentence of 14 months, while pro-choice defendants averaged three months.

Fourteen months versus three.

That is not “equal justice under law.” That is animus-made policy.

And none of this should surprise anyone who has been paying attention for longer than five minutes.

Democrats have been weaponizing the administrative state for decades. This is not some brand-new Trump-era phenomenon, no matter how often the cable news panels pretend otherwise. The Obama administration used the Internal Revenue Service to harass conservative and pro-life organizations. Bill Clinton-era politics normalized the idea that federal power could be turned on political enemies. Biden’s DOJ, if these reports are accurate, simply continued the tradition with a more aggressive posture and a more open contempt for religious dissent.

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Imagine for a moment the scandal if the Trump administration had coordinated with pro-life organizations to build cases against abortion advocates.

Imagine if the DOJ had been caught trading texts with pro-life security teams.

Imagine if federal prosecutors were accused of seeking harsher punishments for abortion-rights defendants while going easy on pro-life defendants.

It would have been a national emergency. Front-page news. Congressional hearings. Wall-to-wall coverage.

But because the targets were pro-lifers, the story is treated like a niche controversy — something for conservative media to discuss, while the mainstream press quietly looks the other way.

That brings us to one of the most important questions of all: How were the people involved in this allowed to remain embedded inside the DOJ for so long?

Patel was reportedly still working at DOJ until Monday. That is not a small detail. That is a flashing red warning sign.

Because it lends credibility to something the political class has mocked for years: The existence of a bureaucratic deep state — career officials who outlast elections, ignore the will of voters and quietly advance an ideological agenda regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.

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This is what it looks like when a permanent governing class decides it is untouchable.

And it also illustrates why the fight to remove ideological holdovers inside federal agencies is not some paranoid fantasy. It’s a real, ongoing struggle, one that will define whether elections actually matter.

The bigger issue here isn’t just abortion politics. It’s the steady normalization of using government power to punish religious Americans.

The Democratic Party has shown, again and again, that it is willing to use the apparatus of the state to crush dissent from people of faith. Not because those people are violent. Not because they are criminals. But because their beliefs are inconvenient.

That’s why millions of Americans have fled places like California, where progressive lawmakers increasingly flirt with the idea that religious organizations should be allowed to operate only if they comply with left-wing doctrine.

It’s not hard to imagine where this eventually goes. Any religious practice that doesn’t comply with the left-wing social agenda will be quasi-criminalized, all under the language of “antidiscrimination,” as if the First Amendment is just an outdated technicality standing in the way of progress.

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If Democrats ever gained full control of the judiciary, especially if they succeeded in stacking the Supreme Court — which you can be sure former vice-president Kamala Harris would have attempted to do if she had won in 2024 — this is exactly the direction they would push the country.

This is why the Biden administration may go down as the worst in modern American history — even worse than Obama’s.

Not because Obama didn’t do the same things. But because Obama understood enough to keep it quiet.

Biden said the quiet part out loud.

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