CV NEWS FEED // President Donald Trump pardoned 23 pro-life activists Thursday, signing an Executive Order the day before the March for Life.
The Biden administration’s Department of Justice targeted pro-life activists across the country under the controversial Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.
Some individuals were sentenced to multiple years in prison after being convicted mostly for engaging in peaceful protests and prayers outside of abortion facilities.
As Trump was about to sign the order, he spoke compassionately about the pardon recipients. “They should not have been prosecuted,” he said several times, shaking his head. “Many of them are elderly,” he added. “This is a great honor to sign.”
Tommy Valentine, director of CatholicVote’s Catholic Accountability Project, praised Trump’s pardons in a statement.
“President Trump’s pardon today of pro-life activists unjustly imprisoned under President Biden is a great credit to his legacy,” Valentine said. “We hope he will go a step further in undoing Biden’s unjust legacy by directing his Department of Justice to evenly enforce the FACE Act, for as long as it is on the books, against violent pro-abortion extremists who have been attacking pregnancy resource centers and churches for years.”
CatholicVote has spent the past several years tracking hundreds of violent attacks on pro-life organizations and churches, which went largely ignored by the Biden DOJ. More recently, CatholicVote has supported efforts to repeal the FACE Act, which the organization highlights has disproportionately targeted pro-life advocates, despite the fact that most abortion-related violence since the repeal of Roe v. Wade has targeted pro-life organizations.
Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, a vocal critic of the Biden administration’s prosecutions of pro-life Americans, released a statement early Thursday before Trump officially signed the order. “It is tremendous news to hear the news that President Trump will soon pardon the brave pro-life Americans who were unjustly targeted by Biden’s weaponized DOJ,” Hawley wrote. “These Americans are peaceful, pro-life Americans who were singled out and targeted by their government solely because of their beliefs.”
I had a great conversation this morning with @realDonaldTrump about the pro-life prisoners unjustly persecuted and imprisoned by the corrupt Biden Administration. I urged him to pardon them swiftly. They have done nothing wrong!
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) January 23, 2025
Trump’s pardons will offer immediate relief to those currently serving sentences, including Lauren Handy (57 months in prison), John Hinshaw (21 months), Jonathan Darnell (34 months), Herb Geraghty (27 months), Jean Marshall (24 months), Joan Bell (27 months), Paulette Harlow (24 months), Bevelyn Williams (41 months), Heather Idoni (24 months), and Calvin Zastrow (6 months).
Many of the imprisoned were senior citizens, and a significant number were Catholic.
In June 2024, Trump vowed that, if elected, he would “rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner who’s unjustly victimized by the Biden regime… so we can get them out of the gulags and back to their families where they belong.”
A letter from the Thomas More Society to Trump, dated Jan. 14th, urged Trump to pardon the prosecuted pro-lifers, listing out the names of 21 activists and detailing their “fatally flawed and plainly unjust” convictions.
One woman, 89-year-old Eva Edl, whom CatholicVote interviewed in September, was still awaiting her sentence for her part in a peaceful protest outside an abortion facility in Michigan.
Edl is a concentration camp survivor who escaped death in the formerly Soviet-controlled Yugoslavia. She fled to the United States with her family and has been a pro-life advocate in the U.S. since 1988.
Edl told CatholicVote by phone: “I became aware of abortions and abortion clinics existing in the United States in 1988. I saw a group of people in Atlanta, Georgia, blocking an abortion clinic.”
“I did not know abortions existed beforehand. And so, I simply said, well, this makes sense, people should have done that for me when I was being shipped into a death camp to be exterminated,” Edl added.
As CatholicVote reported at the time, Trump in his first week had already fulfilled a previous promise, pardoning “about 1,500 people who had been charged in connection to the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot” late Monday.