The Department of Justice released a sweeping 200-page report Thursday accusing the Biden administration of systematically penalizing Christians who acted on their faith, from prosecuting elderly pro-life demonstrators to directing FBI surveillance at Catholic priests who celebrated the Traditional Latin Mass.

The findings come from the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, established by President Trump under Executive Order 14202. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who chairs the task force, framed the report as a formal accounting of what he called government-inflicted harm on believers.

The report spans 14 findings across 17 federal agencies and concludes that the prior administration "zealously pursued actions to limit Christians' ability to act in accordance with their faith" on matters including abortion, gender ideology, and sexual orientation. The picture it draws is not of casual bureaucratic overreach but of coordinated federal pressure applied wherever traditional Christian convictions clashed with Biden-era policy priorities. For Americans who already suspected their government viewed their beliefs as a threat, the document reads like a confirmation.

Prosecuting grandmothers, surveilling priests

Among the most pointed allegations: the Biden DOJ pursued aggressive prosecutions of nonviolent, pro-life Christian demonstrators under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act while responding far less forcefully to violent attacks against pregnancy resource centers. Breitbart News reported that some of those prosecuted included an 89-year-old communist concentration camp survivor, several grandmothers, and a Christian father of eleven.

The New York Post reported that the task force found pro-life Christians received longer sentences than pro-abortion counterparts charged under the same federal statute, a disparity the report treats as evidence of selective enforcement rather than coincidence.

President Trump pardoned more than 20 pro-life activists the Biden DOJ had prosecuted when he returned to office in January 2025. Some of those individuals had already served time in federal prison.

The report's account of FBI conduct may prove even more politically damaging. It describes how the Bureau's Richmond, Virginia, Field Office used a single law enforcement target, a man who identified himself as a "radical traditional Catholic", as a springboard to open a broader investigation into his local church. The Richmond office, the report states, "began to consider traditional Catholics as potential violent extremists or domestic terrorists based on their preferred popes, devotion to the Traditional Latin Mass, and views on abortion, immigration, and human sexuality."

That effort, the task force found, leaned on what it called "baseless allegations from the Southern Poverty Law Center." The SPLC's credibility is itself now under a legal cloud: the DOJ has recently charged the organization with fraud, money laundering, and "manufacturing racism to justify its existence."

Newsmax reported that the task force specifically criticized the FBI's 2023 Richmond memo on "radical-traditionalist" Catholics, saying it led to scrutiny of a traditional Catholic chapel that had no connection to any criminal case. The FBI opened what the report describes as a Guardian profile on an SSPX chapel and monitored a priest and other parishioners.

Conscience rights rolled back

The report's scope extends well beyond law enforcement. National Review reported that the task force found Biden officials rejected religious exemption requests tied to COVID vaccine mandates and transgender accommodation policies at federally funded institutions, actions the report characterizes as undercutting longstanding conscience protections for Christian healthcare workers and educators.

The pattern the task force identifies is consistent: the Biden administration tolerated privately held religious beliefs but moved to limit any public expression of those beliefs that conflicted with its policy agenda. The report states plainly that the administration "penalized Christians who lived in accordance with their beliefs."

That finding aligns with a broader pattern of Biden-era federal conduct that has drawn scrutiny from multiple directions. The FBI's pursuit of investigations into Republican lawmakers even after prosecutors privately dismissed core allegations raised similar questions about whether federal law enforcement was operating on political rather than evidentiary grounds.

Just The News reported that the task force catalogued examples across a wide range of agencies and issues: IRS probes of churches that preached conservative-aligned messages, unequal scrutiny of Christian universities, HHS rules affecting Christian foster parents who held traditional views on gender and sexuality, and regulatory actions the report says were designed to weaken or bypass statutory protections for religious believers.

Blanche: 'That devastation ended with President Trump'

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, issued a statement alongside the report that left little room for ambiguity about the current DOJ's view of its predecessor's conduct:

"No American should live in fear that the federal government will punish them for their faith. As our report lays out, the Biden Administration's actions devastated the lives of many Christian Americans. That devastation ended with President Trump. The Department of Justice will continue to expose bad actors who targeted Christians and work tirelessly to restore religious liberty for all Americans of faith."

The report itself opens with a passage that will draw both praise and criticism. It asserts that "our Nation's origin and system of government bear the imprint of a Christian worldview and ethic, even as its laws protect religious pluralism," and traces the influence of Christian thought through the colonial period, the Revolution, and the drafting of the Constitution.

That framing sets the stage for the report's central argument: that the Biden administration's approach represented a departure not merely from recent norms but from the constitutional tradition itself. Whether one accepts that historical claim in full, the specific enforcement actions documented in the report, the FACE Act prosecutions, the FBI surveillance of parishes, the rejection of conscience exemptions, present a factual record that demands a response from those who authorized them.

The broader question of how far the Biden administration was willing to go in coordinating with the DOJ on politically sensitive matters has been a recurring theme since Trump's return to office. This report adds a new dimension: the allegation that the coordination extended not just to political opponents but to ordinary citizens whose only offense was practicing their faith in public.

Open questions remain

The report does not name every individual prosecuted or every church investigated, and it remains unclear whether the task force's findings will lead to further legal action against specific Biden-era officials. The DOJ has not announced any new criminal referrals tied to the report's conclusions.

Nor does the report address in detail how many of the 17 agencies it examined have already reversed the policies it criticizes. Some changes, like Trump's pardons of the pro-life activists, took effect immediately. Others, particularly regulatory rollbacks at HHS and the Department of Education, may take longer to unwind.

What the report does establish, at minimum, is a documented record: dates, offices, statutes, and enforcement patterns that the current DOJ says demonstrate a federal government that treated traditional Christian belief as a problem to be managed rather than a right to be protected. The ongoing reorganization of DOJ priorities under the current administration suggests these findings will shape policy for years.

A government that prosecutes grandmothers for praying outside clinics while going easy on those who firebomb crisis pregnancy centers has a credibility problem that no press release can fix. The 200 pages speak for themselves.