The Southern Poverty Law Center and allied organizations filed a federal lawsuit challenging the voting district lines used to elect members of the Mississippi Supreme Court. The suit contends that the lines, which have not been adjusted in 35 years, dilute the voting strength of Black voters....
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Alabama’s absentee ballot program is inaccessible to blind voters and voters with print disabilities. It requires those voters to secure another person’s assistance to complete their absentee ballot – forfeiting their right to vote privately and independently.
The SPLC and its co-counsel...
After Florida passed an “anti-sanctuary cities” law mandating cooperation agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) requiring local law enforcement agencies to use their “best efforts” to support federal immigration law enforcement and prohibiting local sanctuary policies, the...
Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) fraudulently claimed to provide services that “convert” people from gay to straight. These services, known as conversion therapy, have been discredited or highly criticized by all major American medical, psychiatric, psychological and professional counseling organizations. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against the New Jersey conversion therapy organization for fraudulent practices. The lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of New Jersey in 2012, charged that JONAH, its founder and a counselor violated New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act by claiming that their counseling services could cure clients of being gay.
Tennessee’s voucher program threatened to siphon hundreds of millions of tax dollars from Nashville and Memphis public schools to private schools, raising the specter of more budget cuts for already underfunded public schools. The SPLC and its allies filed a...
In August 2020, Neville Christopher Brooks, a legal permanent U.S. resident from Jamaica, was unlawfully detained by the Marion County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) in Florida — not for any alleged criminal activity or for any legitimate immigration enforcement concerns but solely because he was born...
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...
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...
After Georgia voters turned out in record numbers for the 2020 presidential election and U.S. Senate elections in early 2021, state legislators passed a sweeping – and unconstitutional – voting law that threatened to massively disenfranchise voters, particularly voters of color. The SPLC and its...
The Cobb County Board of Education in Georgia and state legislators used racial demographic information to “pack” communities of color — particularly Black and Latinx voters — into three of seven school board voting districts to diminish their political power and preserve a white majority on the...
