Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday kicked off the first meeting of a Department of Justice task force designed to eradicate anti-Christian bias in the federal government.
President Donald Trump appointed Bondi to lead the task force after establishing it through a February executive order. The order directs the task force to "identify any unlawful anti-Christian policies, practices, or conduct" and recommend agency heads to end them.
The task force, which will conclude in two years, is also required submit three reports to Trump: after 120 days of its creation, after one year, and after it completes its work.
"As President Trump has stated, the Biden administration engaged in an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians while ignoring violent anti-Christian offenses," Bondi said in her opening remarks. "The president is right. [Former President Joe] Biden's Department of Justice abused and targeted Christians; pro-life Christians were arrested and imprisoned for peacefully praying outside abortion clinics.
"The FBI spied on traditional Catholics in their parishes. President Biden declared Easter Sunday to be Transgender Day of Visibility. No longer. Vandalism against churches was eight times higher in 2023 than it was in 2018. And at President Trump's directive, we ended those abuses at the Department of Justice on Day 1. We dropped three ongoing cases against pro-lifers and redefined the FACE Act [Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act] to ensure that abuse would not continue and that American tax dollars were not used to support the weaponization of our legal system to target Christians."
Many top Cabinet members attended the closed-door meeting, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
"The Department of Justice will protect religious liberty for Christians and for all Americans," Bondi said. "We will work closely with everyone around this table and take a whole-of-government approach to solving this problem and ultimately protect Americans' First Amendment rights.
"The First Amendment isn't just a line in the Constitution. It's the cornerstone of our American liberty. It guarantees every citizen the right to speak freely, worship freely, and live according to their conscience without government interference."
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the free expression of faith is not just a constitutional principle but "something that all forms of civil government should be encouraging."
He continued: "A key challenge that we face is a public misunderstanding of our form of government. We're constitutional republic, not a pure democracy. And this distinction matters because in a republic, individual rights are protected even when unpopular. And this understanding, this distinction allows our institutions and media to misrepresent our founding principles.
"Our government's purpose is to secure rights, not restrict them. So, yes, this task force has a big job ahead, but it's a vital one, and it's one that we're going to get done."
The meeting came on the same day DOJ announced it had filed a brief in support of a lawsuit by the Summit Church-Homestead Heights Baptist Church in North Carolina that is accusing Chatham County of violating the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act by denying an application to rezone several parcels to allow the church to build a new place of worship.
"The Civil Rights Division is committed to defending religious liberties as our founders intended and as federal law requires," Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the DOJ division, said in a news release.