What we know about the FACE and KKK acts that could be used to prosecute Minnesota church protesters

By Cindy Von Quednow, CNN

(CNN) — Sunday church services were underway at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, when protesters entered and began shouting “Justice for Renee Good” and “ICE out,” a video from the incident shows.

“Shame on you!” a person at the church podium shouts.

The demonstrators were at the church to protest David Easterwood, who is listed on the church website as one of the pastors and also appears to be the same person who is a top ICE official in the Twin Cities. He was recently named a defendant in a case brought by protesters who allege immigration agents violated their First and Fourth Amendment rights.

President Donald Trump called the demonstrators at the church “agitators and insurrectionists” and said they are “troublemakers who should be thrown in jail, or thrown out of the Country.”

Now, the protesters could be facing prosecution. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, said the protesters were “desecrating a house of worship and interfering with Christian worshipers.”

The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, she said, is now looking into charges against the protesters using two federal statutes: the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act.

“Everyone in the protest community needs to know that the fullest force of the federal government is going to come down and prevent this from happening and put people away for a long time,” Dhillon said on The Benny Show, a podcast by conservative influencer Benny Johnson.

Here’s what you should know about both laws and how they could be applied.

FACE Act

The FACE Act, enacted in 1994, is a federal law that prohibits “the use of force or threat of force or physical obstruction to intentionally injure, intimidate, or interfere with or attempt to injure, intimidate, or interfere with any person lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship.”

The statute also protects facilities that provide reproductive health services.

Punishment varies from a fine to imprisonment or both, according to the FBI.

It was used against protesters at a synagogue

As of 2024, the Department of Justice has filed more than 15 FACE Act actions in at least a dozen states, with ongoing investigations in others, according to a DOJ news release.

In one 2024 instance, the DOJ filed a lawsuit against demonstrators who “targeted” a synagogue in New Jersey during a protest that turned violent.

The demonstrators “intended to interfere with the synagogue community’s right to freely exercise their religion, including gathering for a religious ceremony to honor the life of a deceased rabbi,” according to the complaint.

Ku Klux Klan Act

The Civil War-era KKK Act passed in 1871 to further protect the rights listed in the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been ratified three years earlier.

Congress passed a series of Enforcement Acts and the KKK Act “was designed to empower the federal government to protect the civil and political rights of individuals,” according to the Office of the Historian at the US House of Representatives.

The act made it a federal crime to deny any group or person “any of the rights, privileges, or immunities, or protection, named in the Constitution.”

At the time, vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan threatened recently freed Black people and their White allies in the South and undermined the Republican Party’s plan for Reconstruction.

It’s rarely used, but it’s been cited recently

While the statute is seldom used, it has been cited in two recent lawsuits against the Trump administration and in other complaints in 2020.

The federal statute was cited in a 2021 lawsuit against Trump by the Democratic chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi. It accused Trump, his attorney Rudy Giuliani, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers of violating the KKK Act by inciting the January 6 Capitol riot to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

Joseph Sellers, an attorney representing Thompson and the NAACP in the lawsuit, called Trump, Giuliani and the two groups the “principal architects” of the insurrection and said the historic law should be used to protect Congress members who were impacted that day.

At the time, Trump was already facing a lawsuit that alleged he violated the KKK Act when he attempted to overturn the election results of major cities in 2020.

That same year, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation filed a federal lawsuit against right-wing political operatives Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, saying they violated the KKK Act when they “conspired to intimidate and threaten many thousands of eligible voters.”

The men were accused of targeting Black voters in 85,000 robocalls that spread false information about voting by mail.

The statute was also cited in a 2020 lawsuit filed by St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner that claimed a police union used a racially motivated conspiracy against her.

Gardner, a Black woman, said the police union harassed and intimidated her and city officials attempted to silence her and remove her from office. The lawsuit, which was ultimately dismissed, alleged these were attempts to block her reform efforts.

Context matters, legal analyst says

The protesters who disrupted Sunday services at the Minneapolis church might have violated the two federal laws, CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig said Tuesday, but context matters.

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech and the ability to voice beliefs, views and ideas, but it’s not an unlimited right and doesn’t apply everywhere, according to the Freedom Forum. The right does not necessarily extend to private places like churches, for example, the Freedom Forum said.

“In fact, the First Amendment protects private people and companies’ right to make their own decisions about speech in their spaces.”

With the church protest, “the conduct that we see here on its face seems to meet the requirements of those laws,” he said.

Honig noted the contrast between the Justice Department’s probe into a non-violent church protest – using the “full force of federal law” – and how it is not currently investigating a fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer.

“Regardless of what one might think the ultimate conclusion should be,” Honig said, “the approach of the DOJ and (Deputy Attorney General) Todd Blanche has been: We’re not even going to look. We’re not even going to do an investigation.”

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CNN’s Nicquel Terry Ellis, Holly Yan, Andy Rose and Elise Hammond contributed to this report.