Officials with Florida’s Collier County schools effectively barred immigrant children with limited English skills from enrolling in high school and pushed them into an adult English program that offered no opportunity to earn credit toward a high school diploma – a violation of state and federal...
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Louisiana discriminated against naturalized citizens by requiring them to provide citizenship documents when registering to vote – a requirement that was not asked of other potential voters who were only required to swear that they are U.S. citizens. The SPLC filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of...
Georgia discriminated against immigrants by enforcing an unconstitutional policy that directed state officials to deny driver’s licenses to people based on their past – rather than current – immigration status.
The Southern Poverty Law Center and Atlanta immigration attorney Justin W....
The SPLC filed a federal civil rights complaint after discovering that Latinos with limited English proficiency were being treated more harshly for traffic offenses than others appearing before a Jefferson Parish court in the suburbs of New Orleans, Louisiana.
The complaint to the U.S....
Mexican guest workers hired by a contractor with more than $9 million in state contracts to maintain the shoulders and medians of rural Mississippi roadways were cheated out of their wages. A federal lawsuit on behalf of six workers alleged that the contractor broke federal racketeering laws....
South Carolina denied in-state college tuition rates to U.S. citizens living in the state but unable to prove the lawful immigration status of their parents – an unconstitutional policy that more than tripled the cost of tuition. The SPLC filed a federal lawsuit to end the practice.
After an exclusive island resort near Charleston, South Carolina, cheated Jamaican guest workers out of their wages over three years, the SPLC sued the resort, which had earned accolades from travel publications and boasted a golf course that hosted the 2012 PGA Championship.
Gulf Coast seafood company R&A Oysters failed to properly pay guest workers it recruited to the United States on temporary H-2B work visas.
The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal lawsuit in 2014 on behalf of a group of migrant workers the company hired to shuck and process...
When Alabama legislators revised the state’s anti-immigrant law in 2012, they passed a law requiring the state to maintain an online list of immigrants who are detained by law enforcement, who appear in court for any violation of state law, and who unable to prove they are not “unlawfully present aliens.” It provided no means for people to be removed from this “black list” if the listing is an error or if their immigration status changes. The Southern Poverty Law Center and its allies filed a federal lawsuit to stop this state-sanctioned “blacklisting” of immigrants, which could encourage harassment and violence.
In the spring of 2009, the U.S. Secretary of Labor suspended regulations for the H-2A guestworker program that would have slashed wages for guestworkers and U.S. workers alike. A federal court blocked the secretary’s suspension on the day it was to go into effect after a group of guestworker employers filed suit. The Southern Poverty Law Center intervened in the case on behalf of U.S. farmworkers and H-2A guestworkers to seek to recover the higher wages they would have earned under the suspension.
