This Is the Organization the Trump Administration Is Treating As a Criminal Enterprise
Trump’s DOJ is preparing to criminally prosecute the Southern Poverty Law Center, targeting the organization over its past use of paid informants to infiltrate white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC used informants to protect its own staff from violence and to share intelligence with federal law enforcement, including the FBI.
For 55 years, the SPLC has been at the forefront of the struggle for civil rights – even amid decades of credible bomb threats, bombings, and assassination plots. It has relentlessly fought white supremacy, and names bankrupting the KKK and forcing the integration of state troopers in the South among its top achievements. While the SPLC has been fighting hate groups, Trump has spent his tenure protecting and emboldening them. He won praise from former KKK leader David Duke after sanitizing the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who planned the Charlottesville rally in 2017. He emboldened and embraced the Proud Boys in 2020, and has pardoned dozens of white nationalists charged over the January 6 insurrection. In his second term, Trump has filled his cabinet with white nationalists and their sympathizers, and systematically dismantled Jim Crow-era safeguards against racial exclusion and discrimination. The contrast between Trump and the SPLC couldn’t be clearer.
The SPLC Bankrupted The Ku Klux Klan. In 1987, the SPLC won a landmark $7 million verdict against the United Klans of America on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose 19-year-old son Michael was lynched by Klan members in Mobile, Alabama — financially destroying one of the nation’s most notorious white supremacist organizations. The SPLC followed that with a $6.3 million verdict against Aryan Nations in 2000, won on behalf of a mother and son who were shot at and beaten by Aryan Nations security guards — a verdict that forced the group into bankruptcy and stripped it of its Idaho compound.
The SPLC Forced The Integration of the Alabama State Troopers. Decades before Trump was proclaiming that white people are the real victims of discrimination, the SPLC was in federal court winning the legal battles that actually expanded civil rights. The SPLC’s lawsuit in Paradise v. Allen forced the integration of the Alabama State Troopers, a ruling affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, and early SPLC cases also drove the desegregation of recreational facilities and the reapportionment of the Alabama Legislature to guarantee Black representation for the first time since Reconstruction.
The SPLC Won The First Successful Sex Discrimination Case Against The Federal Government. In 1973, the SPLC secured a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in Frontiero v. Richardson holding that the Department of Defense could not grant housing and medical benefits to dependents of male servicemembers while denying the same benefits to dependents of servicewomen — the first time a court had ruled the federal government itself was engaged in unconstitutional sex discrimination.
The SPLC Has Faced Decades of Credible Threats, Bombings, and Assassination Plots. In 1983, Klan members firebombed SPLC’s Montgomery headquarters, destroying the building and its records. In 1984, SPLC co-founder Morris Dees became an assassination target of the Order, a violent white supremacist terror group. In 1995, four men were federally indicted for plotting to blow up SPLC’s headquarters. In 1998, six members of a white supremacist group called The New Order pleaded guilty or were convicted after plotting to assassinate Dees, bomb the SPLC building, and poison the water supplies of five American cities — one of them had already shown up to a Dees speech carrying a concealed gun. In 1999, an FBI informant embedded in Aryan Nations uncovered yet another plot to assassinate Dees, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. By 2007, more than 30 people had been jailed in connection with plots to kill SPLC staff or destroy its offices.
Trump’s DOJ Is Doing The Bidding of the Ku Klux Klan. The “donor fraud” theory at the center of the SPLC indictment was publicly demolished 45 years ago by the Klan itself. Fiery Cross, the official newsletter of the United Klans of America, was loudly complaining about SPLC’s informant program in 1981, making clear the program’s purpose was no secret. The idea that SPLC’s donors didn’t know what their money was going toward doesn’t survive contact with the Klan’s own contemporaneous outrage about it. As legal journalist Chris Geidner reported, DOJ’s own indictment contradicts Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s press conference claim that the SPLC was “manufacturing extremism” — and the forfeiture language buried in the charges appears designed to let Trump seize all of SPLC’s donor funds if a conviction is secured.
The SPLC’s Informant Program Shared Intelligence With The FBI and Saved Lives. The paid informant program that Trump’s DOJ is now framing as fraud was coordinated directly with federal and local law enforcement, with the SPLC regularly sharing intelligence from inside white supremacist organizations with the FBI. As the SPLC’s interim CEO Bryan Fair noted, the program was developed “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.” Former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance called the DOJ’s theory of the case — that an organization that single-handedly dismantled the KKK somehow defrauded its donors by concealing the method it used to do that — about as legally meritorious as the now-dismissed charges against Jim Comey.
While The SPLC Was Fighting Hate Groups, Trump Was Protecting Them. The SPLC has spent 55 years tracking, suing, and bankrupting white supremacist organizations — the same organizations Trump refused to condemn when he said there were “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville in 2017, and the same organizations his FBI director celebrated cutting ties with the SPLC over last year. Now, Acting AG Todd Blanche, under pressure from Trump to deliver wins against political enemies, is using the full weight of the federal government to prosecute the organization that did more than any other in America to destroy the KKK in court.
- 2017: Trump Said There Were “Very Fine People on Both Sides” At The ‘Unite the Right’ White Supremacist Rally In Charlottesville. After the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides,” elevating the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who planned the rally to the same level as the counter-protestors present. His comments energized white nationalists around the country. Former KKK leader David Duke publicly praised Trump’s remarks, as did white nationalist leader Richard Spencer.
- 2020: Trump Told Proud Boys to “Stand Back and Stand By.” In 2020, Trump refused to condemn white supremacists and militia groups that had shown up at some Black Lives Matter protests; instead, Trump said, “Almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing.” Later, he declared, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” Members of the far-right “western Chauvinist” group, which has deep and comprehensive ties with white supremacist groups, immediately celebrated Trump’s remarks, and more than 5,000 of the group’s members reportedly posted “Stand Back” and “Stand By” on social media.
- Trump Has Pardoned White Nationalists Charged Over January 6. Trump has pardoned dozens of far-right extremists and self-proclaimed white nationalists serving time in prison over their role in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 – including five members of the Proud Boys and nine members of the white nationalist group Oath Keepers. Stewart Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers, and former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio were among those pardoned by Trump.
- Trump Has Systematically Dismantled Jim Crow-Era Safeguards Against Racial Exclusion and Discrimination. On his second day back in office, Trump rescinded a 60-year-old Executive Order requiring federal contractors to prevent racial discrimination in hiring. In March 2025, the Trump administration dropped a longstanding policy prohibiting federal contractors from having segregated facilities, a safeguard put in place in the 1960s to combat Jim Crow-era racial segregation. In April 2025, Trump directed federal agencies to eliminate the disparate impact standard in civil rights enforcement used as a central tool to undo Jim Crow-era racial exclusion and prevent discrimination in housing, lending, employment, education, health care, and more since the 1970s.
Trump’s Cabinet Is Littered with White Nationalist Sympathizers. The Trump administration is steered by white nationalists and sympathizers sitting in high-profile roles. Trump’s White House is steered by Stephen Miller, who serves as deputy chief of staff despite his affinity for white nationalist literature. Trump appointed Joe Kent as director of the National Counterterrorism Center despite his history of working with members of the Proud Boys. One of the Trump administration’s top lawyers, Paul Ingrassia, attended a speech by neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, and has ties to Andrew Tate. The acting press secretary for the Department of Defense, Kingsley Wilson, called Black Lives Matter “an anti-white terrorist organization.”
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