A slew of nonprofit and legal organizations slammed the U.S. Department of Justice following its announcement of indictments against the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The 11 indictments returned by a Middle District of Alabama federal jury on Tuesday relate to the organization’s hiring of paid informants in extremist groups.
The indictments allege that SPLC committed wire fraud, made false statements to a federally insured bank and engaged in a conspiracy to conceal money laundering to obscure payments to informants.
During a press conference announcing the indictments, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche further alleged that SPLC funded the extremist groups it was targeting to foment division.
“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” Blanche said. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable.”
Following the DOJ’s announcement on Wednesday, American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Anthony D. Romero condemned the investigation into SPLC as “yet another example of the Trump administration’s extreme attempts to silence its critics.”
“This administration’s continued weaponization of the Justice Department to target organizations speaking out against its agenda is anti-American behavior harkening back to the McCarthy era,” Romero said.
“The ACLU stands in solidarity with the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC’s work fighting hate, racism, and injustice in the American South has played a critical role in strengthening the civil rights of millions of Americans. While the Trump administration may not agree with the SPLC’s civil rights mission or work, its efforts to target the organization are fundamentally wrong,” the director continued.
“The Trump administration’s attack against the Southern Poverty Law Center is a direct threat to the values that make America great. In this time of unprecedented peril for our democracy, we urge all Americans of good conscience to join us as we stand in support of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
In a statement released Wednesday by the Legal Defense Fund, the nation’s first legal civil rights organization, President and Director-Counsel Janai Nelson decried the indictments as an attempt to target the civil rights organization’s pushes to expose white supremacist groups.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center has been at the forefront of the fight against hate groups and violent white supremacist organizations for more than five decades, often at great risk. Such extremist groups are a scourge on our democracy,” Nelson said.
The attorney highlighted that former FBI Director Christopher Wray warned in 2020 that “‘the top threat we face from domestic violent extremists stems from those we now identify as racially/ethnically motivated violent extremists.'”
“Despite this warning, the pervasive threats posed by racist violent extremists and hate groups, including their infiltration of law enforcement, persist. Reprehensibly, the Trump administration has not brought these groups to justice,” Nelson said.
“LDF condemns in the strongest possible terms any effort to deploy government resources to target civil rights organizations committed to exposing white supremacy instead of trying to combat it,” she continued. “The federal government is duty bound to protect the rights and liberties of all people in the United States and not act as an instrument of intimidation. We stand in solidarity with SPLC and reject this apparent attempt to distract from this failure and other failures of this administration.”
The Mississippi Center for Justice, in a statement reacting to the DOJ’s accusations, described the indictments as “part of a broader effort to discredit and silence organizations that challenge injustice and speak hard truths.”
“These attacks are not just about one organization. They are about weakening the entire ecosystem of groups working to build a more just and inclusive society. They are about creating fear where there should be courage,” the organization wrote.
Independent Sector, a national membership organization that advocates for nonprofits and charities, also described the indictments as an instance of federal overreach attempting to impose a chilling effect on advocacy-based and charitable organizations.
“Fair oversight is essential to public trust in the charitable sector, but allowing political leaders to target perceived opponents for investigation does nothing but undermine that trust,” said Independent Sector President and CEO Dr. Akilah Watkins.
“The incendiary rhetoric used in this indictment reveals its political nature and undermines the credibility of the investigation,” Watkins added. “We urge policymakers to protect the independence of American civil society and the rights of all nonprofit and philanthropic organizations to speak out and advance their charitable mission without fear of political retaliation.”
Additional statements of opposition to the DOJ’s probe into SPLC have been released by the American Constitution Society, Alliance for Justice and the National Women’s Law Center.
