The United States Department of Justice published a 200-page report on Thursday alleging that the Biden administration conducted wide-ranging discrimination against Christians across federal agencies, with the document – produced by the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, established by executive order in February 2025 – identifying the prosecution of pro-life protesters, the denial of religious exemptions, and the penalisation of Catholic institutions as among its principal findings.

The task force, which drew on the findings of 17 federal agencies and reviewed more than 700,000 internal records, was chaired by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Its central conclusion holds that the Biden administration “generally tolerated religious beliefs that were privately held but zealously pursued actions to limit Christians’ ability to act in accordance with their faith”.

The most detailed and evidentially specific section of the report concerns enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act – the FACE Act, passed in 1994 – which the task force concludes was used selectively and disproportionately against pro-life activists. According to the report’s figures, Biden-era prosecutors sought average custodial sentences of 26.8 months for pro-life defendants, compared with an average of 12.3 months for defendants prosecuted for violence against pro-life pregnancy resource centres. Over the law’s 30-year history, some 25 per cent of all FACE Act prosecutions were brought in the two-year period between 2022 and 2024, following the Supreme Court’s decision in *Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization*; of those prosecutions, 97 per cent targeted pro-life activists.

The report further alleges that Biden-era prosecutors collaborated directly with pro-abortion organisations, including the National Abortion Federation and Planned Parenthood, receiving real-time intelligence on pro-life protest activity and compiling detailed dossiers – in one instance a document of 137 pages including home addresses, photographs of spouses and minor children, and travel plans – which were then used to facilitate prosecution. It also alleges that prosecutors in at least one case attempted to exclude practising Christians from juries, and that exculpatory evidence was withheld from defendants. Four federal prosecutors were dismissed from the Department of Justice on the eve of the report’s publication. President Trump pardoned 23 pro-life activists convicted under the FACE Act within days of taking office in January 2025, and the Trump Justice Department has since directed that FACE Act prosecutions may only be brought in “extraordinary circumstances”.

Among the Catholic cases specifically cited, the report refers to Mark Houck, a Catholic father of seven, who was arrested at his home by FBI agents in 2022 – described in the report as an instance of authorising aggressive arrest tactics rather than allowing defendants to self-surrender. Houck was acquitted at trial. The Justice Department subsequently agreed in February 2026 to pay him $1.1 million to settle a civil claim arising from the arrest, after senior department leadership reviewed evidence in the case.

The report’s other findings range across federal policy. It criticises the Biden administration’s approach to religious exemptions from Covid-19 vaccine mandates, alleging that Justice Department officials advised the White House that employees’ religious objections were “insincere” or “not religious” in nature. It documents the case of a Catholic hospital in Oklahoma that was ordered by federal regulators to extinguish a sanctuary candle on the grounds of fire hazard – the hospital was ultimately permitted to retain the candle behind a barrier – and criticises the Department of Education’s imposition of heavy fines on two Christian universities: Grand Canyon University, fined for allegedly misleading students over programme costs, and Liberty University, penalised for failures in statutory crime reporting. The Trump administration has cleared Grand Canyon University of the charges and rescinded the fine.

A further section of the report addresses the scheduling of Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31, 2024, which coincided that year with Easter Sunday. The Biden administration issued proclamations marking both occasions. The report describes the handling of the date as demonstrating a “profound lack of consideration for the Christian faith”. The Biden administration also flew Pride flags at US embassies internationally during the same period, including at the Holy See in Rome – a decision noted in the report and likely to attract particular attention from Catholic readers given the diplomatic sensitivities involved.

The task force report is the first of two such documents expected from the current administration. A separate Religious Liberty Commission, also created by President Trump, is preparing its own report; preliminary hearings before that body have featured many of the same grievances documented in Thursday’s publication.