Sanjay Patel, a prosecutor in the Civil Rights Division, was terminated this week after he led a team of politicized attorneys who were uncovered by the Trump administration and its Weaponization Working Group at the DOJ.
Three other prosecutors, whose names were not released, were also terminated for their role in using the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act to pursue pro-life activists.
Among the egregious allegations, the now-fired prosecutors are accused of:
*Collaborating with pro-abortion groups to pursue pro-life activists identified by those groups
*Withholding evidence in court from defense attorneys
*Pursuing unusually stiff prison time for pro-lifers
Formed by now-fired Attorney General Pam Bondi in 2025, the Weaponization Working Group said it reviewed 700,000 internal documents that formed a 882-page report published Tuesday.
According to the report, those now-terminated DOJ attorneys were carrying out the orders of Merrick Garland, Biden's attorney general.
Garland set up a "task force" to pursue pro-lifers in July 2022, which came just one month after Democrats witnessed their Roe v Wade ruling get overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the report states.
Reacting to this week’s DOJ report, former county prosecutor and general counsel for American Family Association (AFA), Abraham Hamilton III told AFN the Biden administration turned the DOJ into “legal muscle” for their friends in the abortion industry.
“What has come to light,” Hamilton said, “is evidence that confirms that many in the fight for the sanctity of human life suffered in real time.”
“This Department will not tolerate a two-tiered system of justice,” Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said. “No Department should conduct selective prosecution based on beliefs.”
Patel is a key figure in the report. DOJ emails showed he worked closely with a national abortion group, National Abortion Federation, and a key person there named Michelle Davidson. Davidson, who is the NAF’s security director, gave the DOJ prosecutor the name of a pro-life activist, Lauren Handy, to pursue.
And he did.
AFN previously reported on Handy’s prosecution in a May 15, 2024 story. That was the same week, almost two years ago, Handy (pictured at right) was sentenced to two years and nine months in prison for protesting inside an Washington, D.C. abortion facility, Washington Surgi Clinic, back in 2020.
Daily Wire reporter Mary Margaret Olohan, who followed Handy’s story, reported the pro-life activist targeted Surgi Clinic after she and another other activist discovered a box outside the abortion facility that contained five aborted, preemie-sized fetuses. Those fetuses were setting outside the facility to be sent away as medical waste, but Handy swiped them and asked Metropolitan police to investigate the cause of death. They never did.
Olohan has also reported the Surgi Clinic worked closely with an abortion group, the National Abortion Federation, which would explain how Patel and the DOJ were informed about Handy.
A DOJ press release from 2022 shows Patel was also one of two lead prosecutors who pursued a FACE Act persecution of Mark Houck. He is the Pennsylvania pro-life activist whose home was famously raided by an FBI SWAT team after his federal indictment.
Video footage outside a Planned Parenthood clinic did indeed show Houck twice shoving a man, a clinic volunteer, who was cursing at Houck and his young son.
Despite the physical confrontation, attorneys for Houck assured the DOJ it would lose the case because Houck’s shove did not violate the FACE Act.
The DOJ pursued the case anyway, with the pro-life father facing up to 11 years in prison, and a jury acquitted Houck after only an hour of deliberation.
Houck, who filed a lawsuit against the DOJ in 2023, won a six-figure settlement last week.
Back in the Weaponization Working Group report, it said Patel’s legal team sought much harsher sentences for pro-life defendants: an average 26.8 months, compared to pro-abortion defendants and an average 12.3 months.
