On Saturdays since 2012, protesters have gathered outside the Choices Women’s Medical Center in Jamaica, Queens, starting at 7 a.m. to urge women arriving at the clinic not to have an abortion.

For the next three hours, according to a lawsuit filed in June 2017 by Eric T. Schneiderman, the former New York attorney general, protesters violated federal, state and city laws guaranteeing access to reproductive health care by crowding women as they entered the clinic and ignoring their requests to be left alone. Protesters tried to block the entrance with 3-by-5-foot signs with what they said were pictures of aborted fetuses and allegedly made death threats to people trying to escort women — not all of whom were there for an abortion — into the clinic.

The lawsuit against 13 of the regular protesters asked a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction against the protests and create a 16-foot buffer zone around the clinic.

But in a ruling issued late Friday denying the request for the injunction, Judge Carol Bagley Amon of the Federal District Court for the Eastern District said the attorney general’s office “failed to show” that any of the 13 defendants “had the intent to harass, annoy, or alarm” patients, their companions or the people escorting women into the clinic.