Published on 21 April 2026
In the United States, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been indicted on federal fraud charges, with Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch accusing the civil rights group of improperly raising millions of dollars to pay informants to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups.
The Justice Department alleged that the law center defrauded donors by using their money to fund the extremism it claimed to fight.
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It points to payments of at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to people associated with the Ku Klux Klan, United Klans of America, National Socialist Party of America and other extremist groups.
Blanch said, “The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. Instead it was creating the very extremism it was supposed to oppose by paying sources to promote racial hatred.”
The civil rights group faces charges including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering. The Justice Department brought the case to Alabama, where the organization is based.
The indictment came shortly after the SPLC disclosed the existence of a criminal investigation into its program to pay informants to infiltrate extremist groups and gather information about their activities.
The group said the program was used to monitor threats of violence. It said the information was often shared with local and federal law enforcement.
SPLC CEO Brian Fair said the organization would “vigorously defend itself, its staff, and its work”.
Blanch said the money was sent from the center through two separate bank accounts before being loaded onto prepaid cards to give to members of extremist groups, including the National Socialist Movement and the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club.
Blanch said the group never disclosed details of the whistleblower program to donors.
“Under the laws surrounding a nonprofit, they have to have some transparency and honesty about what they’re telling donors about what they’re going to spend the money on and what their mission statement is and what they’re doing to raise money,” he said.
The indictment includes details about at least nine unnamed informants who were paid by the SPLC through a secret program that prosecutors say began in the 1980s.
According to the indictment, within the SPLC, he was known as a field source, or “FS.” The indictment says a whistleblower was paid more than $1 million between 2014 and 2023 while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Coalition. The second was the Royal Wizard of the United Clans of America.
The SPLC said the event was kept quiet to protect informants.
“When we began working with whistleblowers, we were living in the shadow of the height of the civil rights movement, which saw the bombings of churches, state-sponsored violence against protesters, and killings of activists that the justice system did not respond to.” “There’s no doubt that what we learned from whistleblowers saved lives.”
The SPLC, based in Montgomery, Alabama, was founded in 1971, and has used civil litigation to fight white supremacist groups.
The nonprofit has become a popular target among Republicans who view it as too left-wing and partisan.
The investigation could raise concerns that the Trump administration is using the Justice Department to attack opponents and critics.
It follows several other investigations of Trump’s enemies that have raised questions about whether the law enforcement agency has been turned into a political weapon.
The SPLC has faced intense criticism from conservatives, who have accused it of unfairly stigmatizing right-wing organizations as extremist groups because of its viewpoint. The center regularly condemns Trump’s rhetoric and policies on voting rights, immigration and other issues.
The center came under renewed scrutiny last year after the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
The center included a section about Kirk’s group. Turning Point USA said in the report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024”. It features Turning Point USA As “a case study of the hard right in 2024”.
Kash Patel, appointed by Trump to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), ended his agency’s relationship with the center, which had provided law enforcement with research on hate crimes and domestic extremism.
Patel said the center has been turned into a “partisan smear machine”, and he accused it of defaming “mainstream Americans” with its “hate map”, which documents alleged anti-government and hate groups inside the United States.
House Republicans hosted a hearing focused on the SPLC in December, saying it coordinated efforts with President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration to “target Christian and conservative Americans and deny them their constitutional rights of free speech and free association.”
