Late Tuesday night, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem pledged that authorities would soon arrest those who stormed Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Sunday to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s presence in the Twin Cities.
“There will be arrests tied to that, and people will be brought to justice for how they violated the law in that situation,” Noem said.
To do so, the Trump administration could use a law long weaponized against pro-life protesters to prosecute those who disrupted the church service, including former CNN anchor Don Lemon.
The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, made it a federal crime for pro-life protesters to block the entrances of abortion facilities. Though the law was also meant to protect crisis pregnancy centers and churches, data obtained by Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) shows that 97% of FACE Act prosecutions through 2024 targeted pro-life individuals.
While conservatives have long warned that the law has been weaponized against pro-lifers, the stunt by leftist agitators at the Cities Church in St. Paul creates an opportunity for President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to flip the historical application of FACE on its head.
The FACE Act penalizes those who “by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship.”
That would appear to apply to the storming of Cities Church by a group of activists organized by the Racial Justice Network and Black Lives Matter Twin Cities. The protesters yelled and chanted slogans at worshipers, causing the service to end early. Lemon filmed the demonstration under the guise of an independent journalist and badgered the pastor of the church with questions while the disruption was taking place.
Ryan Tucker, the director of the Center for Christian Ministries at Alliance Defending Freedom, told The Daily Wire that the religious component of the FACE Act has rarely been used. He noted that historically, local and state law enforcement have stepped in to address FACE Act violations, but no such help appears to be forthcoming in Minnesota.
“Here in Minnesota, at least the state attorney general has come out and said that he’s not going to do anything to assist or to pursue any violations of state law,” Tucker said. “What’s really disheartening here is that you’ve got the lead lawyer of the state of Minnesota, Keith Ellison, saying that he’s not going to do anything to prosecute these individuals under those local laws, and in fact, has attempted to validate their actions, completely forgetting that the FACE Act even exists.”
Tucker added that it was very rare for activists to disrupt church services.
“The idea that one could go into a church, disrupt it, threaten the parishioners, and somehow get away with it, which is just absolutely unheard of,” he said. “Churches certainly have the right to worship freely without fear that protesters are going to invade their space and traumatize the families that are present, but that’s exactly what happened this past weekend.”
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon suggested on Monday that the Justice Department would bring FACE Act-related charges against the protesters.
“I see various crimes that have occurred,” she told podcaster Benny Johnson. “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 was referring to how President Joe Biden’s Justice Department ramped up FACE Act prosecutions, pairing it with the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act to garner lengthy prison sentences for peaceful pro-life advocates who demonstrated at abortion facilities.
Biden’s Justice Department successfully prosecuted these cases across the country — from Michigan to Tennessee and Washington, D.C. — and got lengthy prison sentences for multiple defendants.
Lauren Handy was sentenced to 57 months in prison for her role in an October 20 sit-in at the notorious D.C.-based Washington Surgi-Clinic late-term abortion facility.
In another case, 64-year-old Calvin Zastrow and 75-year-old Chet Gallagher were sentenced to prison after they participated in a protest at an abortion facility in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, that involved them praying, singing, and speaking to women arriving at the facility. They were convicted under the FACE Act and the KKK Act for conspiracy against rights, a charge that could come with over 10 years of prison time.
Trump pardoned the two dozen peaceful pro-life protesters during his first week in office.
Dhillon suggested that Lemon might be subject to the KKK Act conspiracy against rights application if it could be proved that he had knowledge of the protest before it took place.
“Don Lemon himself has come out and said he knew exactly what was going to happen inside that facility,” she said. “He went into the facility, and then he began ‘committing journalism,’ as if that’s sort of a shield from being a part, an embedded part of a criminal conspiracy, it isn’t.”
As Lemon questioned a pastor during the disruption on Sunday, he asserted that the activists had a First Amendment right to stage a protest in the church. Tucker was unconvinced with this claim, noting that you can’t make a First Amendment claim while infringing on “someone’s ability to freely worship.”
Trump on Tuesday called for the agitators who stormed the church to be imprisoned or “thrown out of the country.” His Justice Department appears to be ready to take that action.
“The FACE Act is just the start. Like I said, you have material support for disruptive activities, you have conspiracy to violate civil rights, you have potentially the use of other instrumentalities to commit crimes,” Dhillon said on Monday.
The Trump administration has already used the FACE Act to go after left-wing activists who target religious services. In September, the Justice Department filed charges under FACE against a group of protesters who targeted a Jewish synagogue in New Jersey.
Soon after taking office, Trump’s Justice Department issued a memo stipulating that FACE Act cases would only be prosecuted in cases of violence or extreme property damage, a reversal of Biden’s policy.
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