SHAPIRO: How Biden’s DOJ went after pro-lifers

That’s not law enforcement; that’s a political operation

(Evan Vucci / AP Photo)

We now know something the Biden administration 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.

Start with former President Barack Obama, who famously tried to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to violate their religious conscience.

According to reporting from The Daily Wire, Biden’s Department of Justice 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.

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 was originally intended to prevent physical obstruction of abortion clinic entrances. It was also meant to protect churches from disruption.

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.

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 “cutout” organizations to do what the government isn’t supposed to do openly.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 IRS to harass conservative and pro-life organizations. 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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

Ben Shapiro is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and co-founder of Daily Wire+. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author.  (Copyright 2026 Creators.com)