People awaiting trial before a criminal court in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, were coerced into paying hundreds of dollars to a company before they were released from jail – even after they had paid their bail. The SPLC filed a federal lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of...
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A North Carolina state law guts the ability of farmworkers to organize and make collective bargaining agreements with employers.
North Carolina farmworkers and a coalition of civil rights groups – including the SPLC – sued to block implementation of the law on November 15, 2017 in federal...
The city of Corinth, Mississippi, and Municipal Court Judge John C. Ross operated a modern-day debtors’ prison, unlawfully jailing poor people for their inability to pay bail and fines. The SPLC and another civil rights group filed a ...
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency entered the homes of immigrant families without warrants, consent or probable cause – in violation of the Fourth Amendment – solely to detain and deport families, mostly women and children. The raids took place in Georgia in January 2016...
After the Trump administration made changes to the federal Medicaid program that threatened to strip health insurance away from millions of low-income people, the SPLC filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Kentucky residents in danger of losing their coverage.
The Trump policy allowed...
In Cullman County, Alabama, hundreds of people are routinely jailed before trial due to their inability to pay a bail bond for their release. The Southern Poverty Law Center and its partners intervened in a federal class action lawsuit to end the practice.
The lawsuit describes how the...
More than a century ago, Mississippi adopted a state constitution that was specifically intended to prevent formerly enslaved people and their descendants from gaining political influence, in part by blocking their access to the ballot box. A provision of that 1890 constitution – a lifetime...
In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal lawsuit highlighting widespread violations of detained noncitizens’ rightful access to counsel in multiple civil immigration prisons in the Southeast. The...
On April 3, 2018, journalist Manuel Duran was unlawfully arrested by Memphis police while reporting live at a peaceful demonstration connected with the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Even after the charges were dropped, local officials handed him over to U.S...
Detained immigrants were forced to work for as little as $1 a day cleaning, cooking and performing maintenance duties at a privately operated immigrant detention center in Stewart County, Georgia, as part of a scheme to maximize its profits, according to a class action lawsuit the Southern...
