Civil rights groups across the United States have condemned the criminal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and are preparing a coordinated legal and public response, the Associated Press reported on Saturday, October 24. The Montgomery, Alabama-based group, founded in 1971, has long tracked white supremacist groups and worked on voting rights, immigration and policing.

Source: Associated Press via ABC7

In rounds of calls immediately following the indictment, advocates discussed how to support the SPLC, the AP said. Organizers agreed that winning in the court of public opinion would be crucial, leading to dozens of public statements of support and planned rallies. Legal advisers also urged other groups to prepare for similar criminal indictments, protracted legal action and audits of staff and internal documents.

"There's a muscle that has been built among these organizations learned from the law firm debacle," said Vanita Gupta, a former associate attorney general during the Biden administration, who led one of the calls. "The government's goal is often to shut down and paralyze an organization, so that their work has to stop while they defend themselves. And the hope here is that with this broad effort to defend the SPLC, that will not happen," Gupta said, according to the AP.

A coalition of more than 100 activist groups published a letter on Tuesday vowing solidarity with groups they say are unjustly targeted by the federal government, the AP reported. "An attack on one is an attack on all," the coalition declared. Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, called the case "a blatantly obvious attack on civil rights and civil liberties" and said the coalition "isn't going silent."

What the Justice Department alleges

The Justice Department alleges — and the SPLC disputes — that the organization violated federal law through its network of paid informants in extremist groups, that the payments funded hate groups and that donors were misled. The SPLC faces charges of wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering in federal court in Alabama, according to the AP. At a press conference announcing the charges, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said, as quoted by the AP: "The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence." These are allegations in an indictment, not findings of a court.

Separate reporting on the wider case has said the SPLC has pleaded not guilty and maintains that paying confidential sources was a legitimate intelligence-gathering technique used to obtain information about extremist organizations, including information useful to law enforcement.

Source: CharityWatch

Both sides speak

"The indictment is nakedly political and represents the Justice Department turning on itself," said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, according to the AP. NAACP President Derrick Johnson said the administration was seeking "to leverage its position to target individuals and organizations that do not agree with its political thought." Juan Proaño, CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said groups were "not backing down, but we are clear-eyed."

On the other side, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council — an organization the SPLC has designated as a hate group — said the government should pursue convictions and restitution, the AP reported. "For years, the SPLC has used its platform to label and target organizations with whom it disagrees," Perkins said in a statement.

The AP said civil rights organizations have spent the past year reviewing document retention, tax compliance and auditing policies, and some have discussed creating new structures to withstand legal scrutiny. The Justice Department and the SPLC did not respond to the AP's requests for comment for its October 24 report.