Two days after his second inauguration, one of Donald Trump’s first actions of his second presidency was to pardon nearly two dozen anti-abortion extremists, who had violently and illegally barricaded reproductive rights clinics, in some cases injuring staff and patients in the process, and in others, stealing aborted embryos and fetal tissue. At the time, Center for Reproductive Rights President Nancy Northrup told Jezebel the pardons were a “get-out-of-jail-free card inviting anti-abortion extremists to step up their attacks on reproductive health clinics with impunity.”

Last week, MS Now reports that dozens of anti-abortion extremists, including some of those pardoned, met in Washington, D.C. to begin openly planning a renewed campaign of harassment against doctors and patients. The meeting was organized by Randall Terry—who previously founded Operation Rescue, an extreme far-right anti-abortion group that spent the better part of the 1980s and 90s terrorizing abortion clinics.

“We’re bringing [Operation Rescue] back,” one of the activists—who was once involved with Operation Rescue—told MS Now’s Julianne McShane. “We’re going to disrupt this country as much as we can.” Sick.

The extremists Trump pardoned had been convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a 1994 law that was passed following a spike in violence against abortion providers, including the murder of Dr. David Gunn in 1993. In one case, 10 extremists were sentenced to five years in prison after violently blockading and invading a Washington clinic in 2020; in 2022, authorities found five fetuses in the home of Lauren Handy, who led the blockade.

On the same day as those pardons, Trump’s Department of Justice said it would be scaling back the enforcement of federal protections for reproductive rights clinics. Terry told McShane that he plans to revive Operation Rescue now that they don’t have to worry about the FACE Act:

Terry told MS NOW that he’s amassing a new coalition this year under a new banner and hopes to recruit “hundreds of people willing to be arrested” at abortion clinic protests. And this time, given the DOJ’s suggestion that it would not prosecute most FACE Act violations going forward, they’ll operate without fear of federal intervention or lasting consequences.

“Under the Trump administration, we know that they’re not going to prosecute people for FACE violations, and we have people who are at least tepidly pro-life in the White House, in the Senate and in the House,” he said. “This is our window.”

Last week, he called on Bell and dozens of anti-abortion-rights activists to gather at a church, about a mile northeast of Capitol Hill, for a planning meeting. This shepherd had a new flock, and he gave them a new name: Rescue Resurrection.

But the DOJ isn’t throwing out the FACE Act—they’re just now using it instead to only protect places of worship from messaging they hate. Don Lemon, who was arrested on Thursday for covering a peaceful ICE protest at a church in Minnesota, was charged with violating the FACE Act. Before that, in September, the Trump administration sued pro-Palestinian protesters for demonstrating in front of a Jewish synagogue in New Jersey, stating that they had violated the FACE Act.

Present at the meet-up were five activists pardoned by Trump, former Operation Rescue members, and a number of activists under 25. For about 90 minutes, Terry pitched Rescue Resurrection to them, playing an AI-generated song about banning the abortion pill mifepristone, acting out a cringey skit in which he pretended he was a cop arresting protesters, and, of course, soft-launched his plan to potentially run for office in November. He said that to train the next generation of activists, he’d established training grounds in Memphis, Tennessee.

Operation Rescue used to handcuff themselves together outside clinics, and then dramatically slump when police tried to arrest them. But Terry told McShane that “there’s millions of dollars being squandered on inane, lukewarm, rehashed rhetoric” by anti-abortion groups, and that, this time around, they intend to escalate and get more intense.

Extremists freed, clinics abandoned, and a federal law repurposed to protect everyone except the people it was written for. Definitely sounds like the administration is protecting women to me.

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I do not object to being bored if I am paid for it, but I never am paid for it. So many people have run up such long scores with me in this respect, and never paid me, that I will give no more credit. I must have cash down before I will be bored at all, but my figure is very low; so long as I get paid at all I will give people as much fun for their money, by way of letting them bore me, as anyone is likely to do.

— Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912