Court Battles

Trump legal attack on Southern Poverty Law Center stirs fears for nonprofits

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by Rebecca Beitsch - 05/09/26 5:00 PM ET

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by Rebecca Beitsch - 05/09/26 5:00 PM ET

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The Trump administration has launched a legal attack on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), raising questions about the future of other nonprofits at odds with the president.

The center pleaded not guilty Thursday in an unusual case, one that accuses the SPLC of turning its back on its very mission: using a now-defunct informant program to funnel money to the hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) it spent decades fighting.

It’s a claim the SPLC strongly denies — one it says is “not even supported by or contained in the indictment itself.” It also has accused prosecutors of misleading the grand jury to gain an indictment.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, sees the prosecution as a new wave in a long line of cases targeting civil society, an effort he said began with law firms and universities.

“They’ve been murmuring for a long time about the coming assault on the not-for-profit community,” Raskin told The Hill.

“This looks like a whole new frontier in attacking not-for-profit groups that the president considers an enemy or politically incorrect. That’s where we are with this thing.”

The SPLC, founded in 1971, works on criminal justice reform and voting rights, though its most notable work has been tracking the movement of a number of different extremist groups.

Tensions between the SPLC and some conservatives have been building for years, particularly through the group’s “Hate Map” and other work documenting the ideologies of various groups. That includes some that have been supportive of Trump, such as Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and the Proud Boys.

The SPLC argues Turning Point belonged on its list because Kirk had “warned his hundreds of thousands of listeners” they were were being replaced by foreigners.

“He then promised Trump will ‘liberate’ the country from ‘the enemy occupation of the foreigner hordes,’” the SPLC wrote in a 2024 case study.

It said this was an allusion to the “great replacement theory,” a debunked conspiracy in which elite parts of society are said to be intentionally replacing white populations with nonwhite populations through immigration.

“Kirk accused Democrats of embracing immigration as part of their plot to secure voters, permit crime and enact the ‘great replacement,’” the SPLC said.

Conservatives say the inclusion of Turning Point and other groups that espouse restrictionist immigration policies unfairly aligned them with neo nazis and other white supremacists.

“A mere difference in policy opinion may land you on SPLC’s hate map,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), said last December, when a House Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing branding the SPLC as “partisan and profitable.”

“In the aftermath of Charlie’s assassination, there have been no retractions, no accountability, and no acknowledgment of the risks inherent in branding mainstream political figures as existential threats,” he said.

Following Kirk’s killing, the FBI announced in October it was severing ties with the group, with FBI Director Kash Patel accusing it of having become a “partisan smear machine” whose work “has been used to defame mainstream Americans.”

Central to the government’s case against the SPLC is that the group defrauded its donors by failing to alert them their money “was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups.” However, the indictment alleges only one instance in which money from an informant reached other group members and it does not provide any further details.

In pleading not guilty, the SLC on Thursday argued it was “no stranger to legal threats by those on the wrong side of history.”

“The charges against the SPLC are provably wrong; they are based on inaccurate facts and a misapplication of law. Our informant program was successful in accomplishing its purposes: Threats and attacks were prevented, criminal activity was stopped, and information was gathered to dismantle the efforts of hate and extremist groups,” said Bryan Fair, the group’s interim president and CEO, in a statement.

“There is no question that the information the SPLC shared with law enforcement saved lives.”

Democrats in Congress have backed the SPLC while faulting the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) prosecution.

“It is, as far as the indictment reads, a complete abomination of our criminal justice system. They do not show any misrepresentation that was made to donors, and