The Prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Tradition of Citizen-Led Investigation

The Department of Justice’s recent indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against progressive organizations. But in many ways, the SPLC case is singularly audacious—and, some argue, absurd.

It’s the first time this administration has brought criminal charges against a nonprofit. Prosecutors allege that SPLC’s use of confidential informants to monitor White supremacist groups was tantamount to supporting the very groups it claimed to oppose.

Compounding the seeming absurdity is the fact that the SPLC appears to have shared intelligence on specific threats with law enforcement, including the FBI. They even provided details of this cooperation with Department of Justice investigators in the weeks before the indictment, according to a recent filing by SPLC lawyers.

Among the groups the SPLC monitored were the organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA, during which hundreds of torch-wielding men marched through the city, a counterprotester was killed, and dozens were injured. The SPLC also shared information about a man who belonged to an offshoot of the White supremacist Atomwaffen Division, who planned to firebomb a synagogue and surveilled a LGBTQ+ bar for a planned attack. The resulting arrest in 2019 was publicized by the DOJ.

This stands in stark contrast to the public statements of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche following the recent indictment, who insisted that “there’s no information that…these informants…then turned around and shared what they learned with law enforcement.”

“The indictment is ridiculous. There’s just nothing in it,” Beth Gazley, a professor of nonprofit management and governance at Indiana University, told NPQ.

“The complaints are not really about defrauding donors as much as they are about the attempt to label this organization as a domestic terror organization that’s supporting illegal activity,” Gazley said, adding, “It’s having such a chilling effect.”

An Escalating Campaign

The indictment against the SPLC, handed down by a grand jury in April, charges the group with wire fraud, making false statements to a bank, and conspiring to launder money. The government seeks the forfeiture of all money and property connected with the charges, penalties that could lead to the financial dissolution of the group.

The charges stem from the SPLC’s payments to undercover informants between 2014 and 2023, which totaled more than $3 million, according to the DOJ. The indictment alleges that “while the SPLC received donation money under the auspices that the funds would be used to ‘dismantle’ violent extremist groups, this donation money was, instead, being used, in part, by the SPLC to pay leaders and others within these same violent extremist groups.”

The SPLC, which was founded in 1971 in Montgomery, AL, has justified its use of informants as a means to protect minorities from violent extremist groups. The group stopped using informants in 2023, according to filings in the case, and in 2021, it stopped presenting false entities to banks as part of an effort to provide cover for the identities of its informants. (This is the basis for the charges of making false statements to banks.)

In a video statement following the indictment, Bryan Fair, the SPLC’s interim president and CEO, said: “When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the civil rights movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system. There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”

“The incendiary rhetoric used in this indictment reveals its political nature and undermines the credibility of the investigation.”

The SPLC indictment is not the only case of the Trump administration and its supporters in Congress attempting to criminally pursue progressive and left-leaning groups. The administration, along with state and congressional Republicans, has been investigating the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue largely over allegations it accepted foreign donations in violation of campaign finance laws.

President Donald Trump appears to have developed a special animus for the SPLC, however. The group has been on his radar at least since the 2017 Unite the Right rally, an event he famously described as having “very fine people on both sides.”

According to court filings in the current case, the SPLC had “collected voluminous and detailed information about the risk of violence, potential perpetrators and even the potential weapons that could be used at the Charlottesville rally through its informants and compiled this in a lengthy report sent to numerous law enforcement agencies, including to the FBI’s Mobile, Alabama, office ahead of the event.”

In October 2025, the DOJ severed ties with the SPLC, along with the Anti-Defamation League. FBI Director Kash Patel said at the time that the center had “long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine.”

Other conservatives have faulted the group for blurring the line between extremists and conservative groups, including Turning Point USA, which the SPLC described as a “case study on the hard right.”

After the recent indictment, Trump said, “Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law…and it was done to make me look bad. And it turned out to be a total fake.”

In May, the Republican attorney general of Alabama subpoenaed the SPLC as part of its own investigation into the group.

“When a government fails to protect the lives of its citizens, it is up to its citizens to protect themselves.”

Meanwhile, a coalition of nonprofit and civil rights organizations has rallied in support of the SPLC, including Independent Sector. Akilah Watkins, the group’s president and CEO, said in a statement: “The incendiary rhetoric used in this indictment reveals its political nature and undermines the credibility of the investigation. 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.”

MoveOn Civic Action has launched a petition to challenge the state and federal actions being taken against SPLC. At the time of writing, the petition is about 900 signatures away from the 20,000-signature goal.

The Historical Roots of Citizen-Led Investigation

While its use of paid informants makes the SPLC unique among progressive groups, such practices have deep roots in US history. In the 1930s and ’40s, some Americans openly sided with the Nazis, including lawmakers, and some went beyond rhetorical support to actively plotting sabotage and murder.

We know about their activities in large part thanks to a network of spies led by a Jewish war veteran, Leon Lewis. He was able to enlist the cooperation of the Disabled American Veterans and the American Legion.

“Lewis explained to them that the police, the sheriff, and the FBI refused to do anything,” said Steve Ross, a history professor at the University of Southern California and the author of the book Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America. “And [Lewis] said, ‘As Americans, we need to protect other Americans from harm.’ And so this was authorized by the locals of those two national organizations.”

When Lewis’s tactics came to light, they drew condemnation from some groups on the Right. “They were accused by journalists and politicians of the late ’40s and ’50s of being the Yiddish Ku Klux Klan, of being sort of Jewish Nazis,” Ross said.

The use of deceptive investigatory tactics is not unique to the SPLC, nor to the Left. The far-right activist group Project Veritas has generated a lot of publicity—and some costly legal judgments—for using false identities to try to infiltrate and embarrass progressive organizations. A growing number of journalist influencers of various political persuasions have employed deceptive tactics in their reporting.

Ross acknowledges that spying on extremist groups carries inherent risks. “I’m not telling anyone to go undercover because you really do risk your life when you do that,” he said.

At the same time, Ross pointed to the political philosophy of John Locke, who believed that the primary reason people formed societies and agreed to be governed was to ensure their own safety.

“Consequently,” he said, “I would argue that when a government fails to protect the lives of its citizens, it is up to its citizens to protect themselves.”