Ben Johnson | The Washington Stand
President Donald Trump has kept his campaign promise to pardon nearly two dozen peaceful pro-life advocates prosecuted by the Biden-Harris administration.
The 47th president signed a pardon for 23 pro-life advocates, many of them elderly and still incarcerated, whom the Biden administration’s Justice Department threatened with up to 11 years in prison for carrying out nonviolent protests against abortion or infanticide.
“Twenty-three people were prosecuted. They should not have been prosecuted. Many of them are elderly people. They should not have been prosecuted,” said President Trump, who called their imprisonment “ridiculous.”
“This is a great honor to sign this,” said Trump, holding up the signed document on Thursday afternoon. “They’ll be very happy.”
Then-candidate Trump promised to reverse the Biden administration’s pro-abortion prosecutions — apparently for the first time — at the 2023 Pray Vote Stand Summit, organized by Family Research Council Action. “To reverse these cruel travesties of justice, tonight I’m announcing that the moment I win the election, I will appoint a special task force to rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner who’s been unjustly persecuted by the Biden administration … so that I can study the situation very quickly and sign their pardons or commutations on day one,” vowed the past-and-future president. “Never again will the federal government be used to target religious believers.”
Under the Biden-Harris administration, America had turned into “a banana republic” or “a Third World country,” where justice depends on the political views of the accused, Trump told the cheering crowd at PVSS 2023. “The radical Left is coming after all of us, because they know that our allegiance is not to them; our allegiance is to our country and to our Creator.”
After the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the Biden administration launched into an aggressive prosecution of right-to-life advocates under the 1994 Federal Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, as well as the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a move legal experts said is unprecedented.
“Today is a new day for the pardoned pro-life advocates who have suffered FBI raids, federal prosecutions, and severe punishment for peacefully and courageously witnessing for life. We thank President Trump for keeping his promise to these pro-life mothers, fathers, grandparents, pastors, and priests,” Peter Breen, executive vice president and head of litigation at the Thomas More Society told The Washington Stand. “What happened to these peaceful pro-life individuals must never happen again. We urge Congress to act swiftly in repealing the FACE Act to make sure that the Justice Department can never again weaponize this law to target peaceful pro-lifers with severe charges.”
The Thomas More Society formally petitioned for President Trump to take mercy on 21 of the 23 pardon recipients: Joan Bell, Coleman Boyd, Joel Curry, Jonathan Darnel, Eva Edl, Chester Gallagher, William Goodman, Dennis Green, Lauren Handy, Paulette Harlow, John Hinshaw, Heather Idoni, Jean Marshall, Fr. Fidelis Moscinski, Justin Phillips, Paul Place, Paul Vaughn, Bevelyn Beatty Williams, Calvin Zastrow, Eva Zastrow, and James Zastrow.
The other two pardoned pro-life advocates, Herb Geraghty of Pennsylvania and Jay Smith of New York, took part in the 2020 D.C. protest. Smith entered a guilty plea in exchange for a 10-month sentence.
“It’s happening, and I NEVER doubted!” exclaimed Bevelyn Williams’ husband, Rickey. After the pardon, a friend of Bevelyn Williams revealed that Mr. Williams “just called me and the sheer joy and relief in his voice over the pardon just given for his amazing wife Bevelyn Beatty Williams, was heartwarming.”
Their convictions stem from at least five separate prosecutions, some predating the Biden administration:
- Bevelyn Beatty Williams held a pro-life “rescue” at Planned Parenthood’s “Manhattan Health Center” on June 19 and 20, 2020. Judge Jennifer Rochon, a Biden appointee in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, sentenced the 33-year-old Catholic mother of a toddler to 41 months (3.5 years) in prison after the DOJ alleged Williams “pressed her body against the door of the Health Center’s patient entrance and refused to move,” allegedly hurting a pro-abortion individual’s hand in the process as the individual tried to force the door open. “As a result of the blockade, medical staff was delayed in treating at least a dozen patients,” noted the Biden administration’s Justice Department.
- Seven evangelical Christians had protested at the Northland Family Planning Clinic in the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights on August 27, 2020. “[T]he defendants sat or stood in front of the entrances to the clinic so that patients and employees could not enter,” explained Biden’s DOJ. Although convicted, the defendants still had pending issues before the court last November when Judge Matthew Leitman, an Obama appointee, paused the trial.
- Ten pro-life advocates protested reports that late-term babies, possibly even full-term, were being aborted by Cesar Santangelo at the Washington Surgi-Center. Among other actions, they sang “Let There be Peace” during the October 22, 2020, protest. Advocates would find the corpses of five viable babies marked as medical waste at the center. Five members of the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising— Handy, Hinshaw, Idoni, Geraghty, and Goodman — were convicted in August 2023 of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee who has handed down numerous pro-abortion opinions, ruled the defendants must remain in prison until the sentencing hearing.
- Four Christians sang hymns inside Nashville’s Carafem Health Center Clinic on March 5, 2021. U.S. District Judge Jeffery S. “Chip” Frensley, who was elected as a magistrate judge by U.S. district judges during the Obama administration, deliberated less than an hour before convicting U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger — a Clinton appointee who previously ruled the Tennessee state constitutional amendment protecting natural marriage “will soon become a footnote in the annals of American history” — reportedly sentenced Gallagher to 16 months in prison and gave other defendants between six months and three years of supervised release. Frensley sentenced 89-year-old Edl to three years of probation.
- Fidelis Moscinski, a Franciscan friar, locked the entrances to the Planned Parenthood abortion business in the Long Island city of Hempstead on July 7, 2022. After police cut off the locks, Fr. Fidelis laid down in front of the entrance — much as protesters laid down in front of President Lyndon Johnson’s limousine in the 1960s. The Biden-Harris administration charged the monk, whose birth name is Christopher, even as local New Jerseyprosecutors dropped charges against the mendicant for conducting his “Red Rose Rescues,” when he would enter abortion facilities and give mothers red roses. New York Judge Steven Tiscione, an Obama appointee, sentenced him the maximum sentence of six months in prison. “My actions … were done because Planned Parenthood as an organization is in the business of killing,” the monk told the magistrate.
At least 10 of the 23 reportedly remain in prison: Joan Bell (who was sentenced to 27 months in jail), Jonathan Darnell (34 months), Herb Geraghty (27 months), Lauren Handy (57 months), Paulette Harlow (24 months), John Hinshaw (21 months), Heather Idoni (24 months), Jean Marshall (24 months), Bevelyn Williams (41 months), and Calvin Zastrow (6 months).
Joan Bell’s husband, Chris, told Laura Ingraham of Fox News Thursday night that “Joan’s actions that day, going into this late-term abortionist’s [facility] in Washington, D.C., with nine other people, was to really prevent women from having a lifelong scar that they will never forget.”
“The pro-life movement is about helping, not about hurting,” he said.
The nation’s pro-life leaders praised President Trump for giving these advocates legal relief. “We thank President Trump for immediately delivering on his promise to free pro-life protesters who were targeted and imprisoned by Biden’s Department of Justice,” SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser told TWS. “Pro-life moms, grandmothers, and even Eva Edl, a communist prison camp survivor, were thrown in jail for peacefully protesting abortion. As if that were not enough, aggressive sentences were handed down, like five years for Lauren Handy who sought to expose evidence of late-term and potentially illegal abortions in the nation’s capital.”
“Praise God!” said Ryan Bomberger, founder of The Radiance Center.
The “American Family Association (AFA) has been calling and preparing for the pardon of these 20-plus pro-lifers over the past several months in preparation for President Donald Trump being sworn in,” American Family Association CEO Walker Wildman told American Family News.
The pardons undo some of the jurisprudence of the Biden administration, which sought to assist the abortion industry after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, said Republican lawmakers. “At the behest of progressive activists, the Biden administration blatantly weaponized the power of federal law enforcement against peaceful pro-life advocates because their beliefs conflicted with President Biden’s radical abortion agenda,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, told TWS. “I am grateful that President Trump has restored justice, ending an ugly era of discrimination against peaceful, often times prayerful pro-life dissenters.”
Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told “Washington Watch” Wednesday that these defendants “were singled out” by “the most anti-Christian administration in our country’s history” to be “terrorized using lawfare to make a point, to try to silence all the rest of us.”
“These heroic peaceful pro-lifers were treated shamefully by Biden’s DOJ, with many of them branded felons and losing many rights that we take for granted as American citizens. Today, their precious freedom is restored. What happened to them can never be erased, but today’s pardons are a huge step towards restoring justice,” agreed Steve Crampton, senior counsel at the Thomas More Society, in an email to TWS.“Thank you to President Trump and his team for righting these grievous wrongs of the previous administration.”
On the Senate floor Thursday, Senator Hawley called the prosecutions “a grotesque assault on the principles of this country,” with its long history of nonviolent protest.
For the Biden-Harris administration to target peaceful right-to-life advocates as radical abortion ideologues literally firebombed pro-life pregnancy resource centers was “particularly grotesque,” said Hawley. America also saw 436 church attacks with zero FACE Act prosecutions in 2023, noted the senator’s wife, constitutional attorney Erin Hawley, during a congressional hearing, citing a report from Family Research Council scholar Arielle Del Turco.
“The Biden-Harris administration practiced viewpoint discrimination in their prosecutions, going after people not for what they did, but what they thought while doing it,” Students for Life Action President Kristan Hawkins told TWS.
Many called for the repeal of the 1994 FACE Act, a Clinton-era bill to protect a “constitutional right” that the 2022 Dobbs decision ruled never existed.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told TWS the pardons represent “a tremendous step towards righting the wrongs done under Biden, but Congress must also take the step to repeal the FACE act to ensure it can never again be weaponized by a future administration. That’s why last Congress I introduced legislation to repeal it with my friend, Senator Mike Lee” of Utah.
Roy noted that “97% of FACE Act prosecutions between the years of 1994-2024 were initiated against pro-life Americans; it is laughable to argue that the law hasn’t been weaponized. Let’s put H.R. 589 on the president’s desk and end this once and for all.”
With Thursday’s pardon, “President Trump has rightly restored equal protection of the law by pardoning the peaceful pro-life advocates, including Eva Edl, an 89-year-old Soviet concentration camp survivor who sat in her wheelchair at the entrance to an abortion facility. Eva faced a sentence of up to 11 years in federal prison along with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines just for singing and praying from her wheelchair,” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Erin Hawley told TWS. “The president’s pardon is a crucial first step in returning the Department of Justice to the rule of law.”
“President Trump has consistently taken a strong stance that weaponizing the government to go after pro-life advocates and other ideological opponents is wrong,” Dannenfelser told TWS. “There is no question these prosecutions were political. Even ex-FBI Director Chris Wray admits the overwhelming majority of abortion-related threats and violence since Dobbs is directed at pro-life Americans — not done by them. We look forward to the end of Biden’s anti-life discrimination under Attorney General Pam Bondi.”
“The corrupt era of Joe Biden and his weaponized Department of Justice (DOJ) has ended, and peaceful, pro-life Americans rest easier knowing that their free speech rights are safer today. However, the work is far from over. Congress should eliminate the FACE Act, and debar and defund Planned Parenthood,to end the prejudice in the law against pro-life Americans and for abortion,” Hawkins told TWS.
“While there are still many things on the pro-life movement’s to-do list for Trump and Vice President Vance to consider, this act of solidarity with the pro-life community gives us hope.”
SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON STAND
