By Andrew Goudsward and Nate Raymond
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department’s new leadership under President Donald Trump ordered cutbacks on Friday on federal prosecutions of people accused of blocking access to reproductive health centers and abortion clinics, calling such cases a “weaponization” of law enforcement.
Future abortion-related prosecutions and civil cases pursued under a law called the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act, will be permitted only in severe cases and “extraordinary circumstances,” according to a memo issued by Chad Mizelle, chief of staff to the attorney general.
The 1994 law prohibits the use of force and physical obstruction to interfere with a person obtaining or providing reproductive health services.
Mizelle, in a memo reviewed by Reuters, also ordered the immediate dismissal of three civil cases filed against defendants who were accused of obstructing access to clinics in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
The memo was issued the same day that abortion opponents descended on Washington for the annual March for Life and a day after Trump signed pardons for 23 anti-abortion protesters, including a set of people convicted of blockading a clinic entrance.
Those pardons were condemned by Krista Noah, an official at the reproductive healthcare organization and abortion provider Planned Parenthood Federation of America, who said Trump’s action had “greenlit violence against abortion providers, all at the expense of people who wish to live in peace and safely exercise the reproductive freedom they deserve.”
Friday’s memo marked a shift from the approach taken by the Justice Department under Democratic former President Joe Biden, whose administration had pursued several such cases under the FACE Act.
After the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, in 2022 overturned the landmark 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade that had made abortion legal nationwide, former U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland launched a Reproductive Rights Task Force aimed at protecting access to reproductive care.
Mizelle, in Friday’s memo, said Trump had “campaigned on the promise of ending the weaponization of the federal government,” and that cases pursued under the FACE Act had been “the prototypical example of this weaponization.”
Going forward, Mizelle said, future abortion-related FACE Act cases would be brought only in “extraordinary circumstances, or in cases presenting significant aggravating factors, such as death, serious bodily harm or serious property damage.”
Mizelle said that until further notice, no new abortion-related cases under the law would be permitted without top-level authorization within the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward in Washington and Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Will Dunham)
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