Justice Department Indicts Southern Poverty Law Center on Fraud Charges

A federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering, accusing the civil-rights watchdog of secretly steering more than $3 million in donated money to people tied to violent extremist groups between 2014 and 2023. The Justice Department said the FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation worked the case, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Middle District of Alabama filed two forfeiture actions tied to the allegations.

The SPLC denied the accusations and defended its mission, which dates to 1971, when the organization was founded to help make the promises of the Civil Rights Movement real. Its leaders said the center remained positioned to help communities confront white supremacy and protect democracy, even as the indictment put the group’s finances, credibility and internal controls under intense federal scrutiny.

Those charges landed after years of internal upheaval. The center fired co-founder Morris Dees in March 2019 amid misconduct allegations and reports of workplace racism and harassment, and workers later unionized. In June 2024, the SPLC said it was undergoing an organizational restructuring and consolidating or eliminating programs; the union said the cuts affected more than 60 union members and at least 20 supervisors, including staff in Immigrant Justice, the Immigrant Freedom initiative and Learning for Justice. In July 2025, Margaret Huang stepped down as president and chief executive, and the board named constitutional scholar Bryan Fair as interim president and CEO while it began a national search.

The organization remains well-resourced on paper. In its latest fiscal year, the SPLC reported an endowment of $731.9 million and said it spent about 73.9% of total expenses on program services. It also said it documented 1,371 hate and antigovernment extremist groups in the United States in 2024, a reminder of how central its monitoring work remains to its public identity.

The dispute carries added historical weight in Montgomery. In July 1983, the Ku Klux Klan firebombed the SPLC’s headquarters there, destroying the building and records, and Morris Dees later received repeated death threats. That history now sits alongside a new federal case that could force the center to defend its mission, its leadership and its institutional survival at the same time.