In Gardendale, Alabama, municipal court defendants unable to pay court costs and fees in full were placed on probation with the company Private Probation Services (PPS), which charged defendants a $40 monthly fee for supervising their probation. These payments were unconstitutionally enforced...
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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 ...
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...
The North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has revoked the licenses of hundreds of thousands of people simply because they cannot afford to pay traffic fines and court costs. The SPLC filed a federal lawsuit seeking to end the practice, which disproportionately harms African-American...
Charles Gresham has had trouble finding and keeping work because of issues related to his seizures. He received a notice from the state of Arkansas that if he did not meet a requirement to work 20 hours a week, he would lose his Medicaid coverage. When he tried to report his work hours to the...
Alabama unlawfully suspended the driver’s licenses of thousands of people unable to pay traffic tickets. The SPLC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the state from suspending licenses without considering a person’s ability to pay and finding that the person willfully failed to pay. It also sought...
Federal immigration authorities detained thousands of people each month in Georgia’s Irwin County Detention Center and Stewart Detention Center, even though many of these individuals were found eligible for release. Hundreds remained in detention because immigration officials refused to set an...
The South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles’ policy of automatically suspending the driver’s licenses of people unable to pay traffic tickets resulted in the current suspension of more than 190,000 driver’s licenses as of May 2019. The SPLC and its allies filed a federal lawsuit challenging...
Alabama’s unconstitutional laws against panhandling violate the First Amendment’s freedom of speech protection. The SPLC and its allies filed a federal lawsuit to immediately stop the city, county and state from enforcing two statutes that prohibit panhandling.
The complaint describes how...
After the sheriff of Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, failed to release public records about COVID-19 within the county jail, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit against the sheriff for violating the Alabama Open Records Act.
The lawsuit was filed four months after the...
