Jonathan Darnel, a pro-life advocate pardoned by Trump, was part of a peaceful protest outside a D.C. abortion clinic in Oct. 2020. Two years later he was arrested for a violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. Darnel was sentenced to 34 months in prison.
Was his arrest meant to set an example to deter others from protesting at abortion clinics?
Restoration News spoke to Mr. Darnel, a devout Christian passionate about saving the lives of pre-born babies. We asked him why the Justice Department waited two years to arrest him. He connected the story to two other pro-life advocates, Lauren Handy and Terrisa Bukovinac, who in 2022 discovered a box labeled “medical waste” outside the same D.C. abortion clinic—Washington Surgi-Center—where Darnel had previously protested in 2020. That box contained 115 aborted babies, including 5 reportedly in the 2nd and 3rd trimesters of gestation when they died. One boy was fully formed.
Handy and Bukovinac contacted a lawyer, who asked D.C. police to collect and autopsy the babies as part of a criminal investigation. Yet shortly after, the FBI arrested Handy—not the abortionists—on an unrelated charge involving the Oct. 2020 protest nearly two years prior.
The same day Handy was arrested, a grand jury indicted Darnel and others for their involvement in the same incident—again, nearly two years after it happened.
In other words, instead of investigating the horror these activists uncovered, authorities launched a misdirection campaign to punish them and draw public attention away from the butchered babies.
Now skeptics rightly ask: Were these arrests coincidence or a deterrence measure to scare other pro-life activists into submission?
Facing (In)justice
Congress passed the FACE Act in 1994 over concerns of violence at “reproductive health centers” (i.e. abortion clinics, but also crisis pregnancy centers). The statute criminalizes efforts to obstruct, injure, intimidate, or interfere with any person “because that person is or has been, or in order to intimidate such person or any other person or any class of persons from, obtaining or providing reproductive health services.”
During the Biden administration, the Justice Department charged 24 cases under the FACE Act—only two of which involved protecting crisis pregnancy centers. The other 22 were against pro-life advocates protesting abortion—despite a rise in violence against pro-life clinics since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Nearly 400 attacks against pro-life clinics and churches have been reported since then.
The maximum punishment under the FACE Act is no more than 6 months in jail for a non-violent first offense. Darnel helped to plan and record the 2020 protest, where there was no violence, but he did not participate in physically obstructing the clinic.
So why the lengthy sentence? Darnel explained that the Justice Department heaped on “conspiracy against rights” charges in addition to FACE ACT charges, using an 1870 law meant to protect black people from the Ku Klux Klan. The Biden Justice Department became the first in American history to use it against pro-lifers peacefully protesting at abortion clinics.
Freed by 47
Jonathan Darnel has mixed emotions about his pardon from President Trump. He said he “has been banging the drum for two years” regarding the FACE Act’s constitutionality. While he’s happy to be out of prison, his pardon eliminates the ability for his and other cases to make it to the Supreme Court, where it could be overturned. That leaves it up to Congress as the last resort for changing the law before it’s again weaponized against pro-life advocates by a future Democratic administration.
Under the reign of the radical Left, Black Lives Matter protesters could burn down buildings with no consequences, but Christians who peacefully sought to save babies’ lives were jailed. The nation can’t afford to forget that prejudice and hypocrisy.
On January 21, 2025, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) introduced legislation to repeal the FACE Act. Rep. Roy states, “Americans just spent the last four years being targeted by a weaponized justice system. The FACE Act was one of the primary weapons of abuse—being used to politically target, arrest, and jail pro-life Americans for speaking out and standing up for life.” It’s time for congressional Republicans to do the right thing: overturn the FACE Act.
All DOJ personnel who worked on J6 martyr and anti-abortion protester prosecutions should be terminated.
Clean house!!
Of course the left will call it revenge, but in reality it is a course correction against the weaponization of the justice department.
It is exactly this kind of two-tiered approach to law enforcement that led to PDJT’s second term. And anything that can be done to terminate the employment of those involved needs to happen because either a) they are partisan hacks drunk on their own power or b) spineless cowards willing to participate in unlawful actions to save their own skins. Whichever it is, they have no place in law enforcement or the judicial system.