President Trump signed orders on Thursday granting pardons to anti-abortion activists a day before the annual March for Life rally in Washington.
An aide who handed the orders to Mr. Trump to sign described them as relief for some 23 “peaceful pro-life protesters.”
“They should not have been prosecuted,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office. “This is a great honor to sign this.”
Mr. Trump did not specify the names of the people who received the pardons, but the order that he held up for cameras to capture included the names of 10 anti-abortion activists who were prosecuted under the Biden administration for their roles in blockading an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C., in October 2020.
The defendants in that case were charged with two federal offenses: conspiring against civil rights and violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, for the parts they played in blocking the entrance to that clinic. That law makes it a crime to threaten, obstruct or injure a person seeking access to a reproductive health clinic or to damage clinic property.
One of the anti-abortion activists, Lauren Handy, was sentenced to nearly five years in prison last year for her role in leading the blockade. Her case drew widespread attention when the police said that they had found five fetuses in her home shortly after she was charged in the case. Other defendants received sentences of less than three years in prison. One defendant, Jay Smith, 34, of Freeport, New York, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 months in prison.
The defendants, their representatives and allies, including Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, have argued that they were exercising their First Amendment right to protest. Mr. Hawley celebrated Mr. Trump’s move Thursday on social media, and he has said that he had urged the president to pardon them swiftly.
The FACE Act, the 1994 law that protects reproductive health clinics, was rarely used during Mr. Trump’s first term. But in response to the State of Texas’ passing a restrictive abortion bill in 2021, Merrick B. Garland, the attorney general in the Biden administration, signaled that the Justice Department saw enforcement of the FACE Act as a priority as it sought to protect the constitutional right to abortion more broadly.
The anti-abortion activists Mr. Trump pardoned were charged in March 2022, and the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion enshrined by Roe v. Wade later that year.
Steve Crampton, senior counsel at the nonprofit Thomas More Society law firm, which represented Ms. Handy, said that his client and her co-defendants “were treated shamefully by Biden’s D.O.J.,” referring to the Department of Justice, “with many of them branded felons and losing many rights that we take for granted as American citizens.”
He added, “Thank you to President Trump and his team for righting these grievous wrongs of the previous administration.”
It was the latest act of clemency by Mr. Trump, who on Day 1 of his presidency pardoned nearly all of the nearly 1,600 people charged with crimes in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol — including violence against police officers. Federal prosecutors in the cases of the anti-abortion activists asserted that they had used force and intimidation to prevent people from seeking care.
“These defendants conspired to use force to prevent fellow citizens from exercising rights protected by law,” said Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, after three of the people pardoned by Mr. Trump were sentenced last year.
Mr. Graves, who stepped down as U.S. attorney earlier this month, also oversaw many of the prosecutions in the Jan. 6 cases.
Vice President JD Vance is expected to speak at the March for Life gathering, which began in protest of Roe v. Wade, on Friday.
During the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump carefully calibrated his message on abortion, saying that he would not sign a federal ban on abortion and that the issue should be left up to the states, a position that earned him rare criticism from anti-abortion groups.
Mr. Vance, who has previously supported imposing a national ban on abortion, had at one point claimed that Mr. Trump would go so far as to veto such a ban, but Mr. Trump disavowed that pledge during his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. Weeks later, Mr. Trump said he would, in fact, veto a national abortion ban.
