Civil rights groups scrambled to protect themselves and shore up support following the criminal indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center this week.
In rounds of calls immediately following the indictment, advocates discussed how to support the SPLC, which federal prosecutors accused of illegally funneling funds to hate groups in support of its informant network.
The calls were part of a coordinated response that had been planned for more than a year, in anticipation to heightened scrutiny by the Trump administration.
In a flurry of behind-the-scenes coordination, civil rights groups dug in for a potential wave of indictments and audits meant to cripple their activities.
“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,” said Vanita Gupta, a former associate attorney general of the Justice Department during the Biden administration, who led one of the calls that convened activists.
Without addressing the indictment, a coalition of more than 100 activist groups on Tuesday published a letter vowing solidarity with groups that are “unjustly targeted” by the federal government. SPLC was a signatory to the pact.
“An attack on one is an attack on all,” the coalition — called the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights — declared. “We will share knowledge, resources, and support with any organization threatened by abuses of power.”
For decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center has sponsored clandestine agents within hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and Unite the Right, which organized a notorious 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, VA.
But the Trump administration claims the sheer amount of money spent on these operations in recent years — allegedly $3 million between 2014 and 2023 — went beyond mere intelligence gathering and actually helped fund the hate the SPLC purports to fight.
With Post wires.
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