Congressman Chip Roy, chairman of the subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, has sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray Director, asking him to explain the disparities between the treatment of pro-life and pro-abortion protesters since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade. Roy gave Wray a deadline of 5:00 p.m. on September 2, 2024.
In November 2022, Wray testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, saying that about 70% of the abortion-related violence and threats carried out after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June of that year were perpetrated by abortion advocates against pro-life groups. Despite this, 97% of the prosecutions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act have been of pro-life activists.
According to The Daily Signal, Roy told Wray on Monday that since January 2021, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has brought 22 FACE Act violation charges against pro-lifers in 22 cases — compared to charging pro-abortion activists in just two cases.
“This data is particularly troubling in light of the fact that there have been at least 90 individual cases of attacks on pro-life organizations and pregnancy resource centers since the May 2022 leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion for the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case,” Roy wrote, adding, “The fact that the Department’s own data shows that a mere 8 percent of FACE Act cases filed by the Biden-Harris administration are against agitators at pregnancy resource centers would seem to belie your assertion that a majority of ‘abortion-related violent extremism investigations have focused on violence against pro-life facilities’ following the Dobbs decision.”
Roy wants Wray and the FBI to provide documents “sufficient to substantiate your assertion that the FBI has undertaken more abortion-related violent extremism investigations focusing on violence against pro-life facilities as compared to abortion facilities since May 2, 2022.”
As previously noted by Live Action News, a report from the Daily Caller stated that from 1994 to 2024, 205 cases were brought against pro-lifers, compared to just six against pro-abortion activists. In that 30 years, at least 55 (27%) of those cases were prosecuted by the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ), and just five of those involved attacks by pro-abortion activists. This means in under four years, the Biden DOJ has prosecuted more than one-fourth of all FACE Act cases since the Act came into existence 30 years ago.
Despite this, in July 2024, Wray told the House Judiciary Committee that he doesn’t believe the Biden administration has been targeting pro-life activists but has been focused on working to investigate violence against pro-lifers.
“Unequal enforcement of the law is a violation of the law,” Sen. Mike Lee, who is calling for the repeal of the FACE Act, said in May, “and men and women who try to expose the horrors of abortion are being unjustly persecuted for their motivations.”
