After the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) violated the Constitution by blocking immigrants in isolated civil immigration prisons from accessing lawyers, the SPLC filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against the agency and other high-level federal officials.
The federal lawsuit...
After the federal government failed to release records under the Freedom of Information Act that would shed light on controversial – and potentially unconstitutional – immigration raids in 2016 that took more than 100 women and children from their homes and placed them in a Texas detention...
In 2018, the Duval County School Board in Florida began hiring armed civilians, known as “school safety assistants,” to patrol the district’s elementary schools. The program threatened the safety of thousands of students by opening the door for inadequately trained assistants – who are not law...
The founder of a major neo-Nazi website orchestrated a harassment campaign that relentlessly terrorized a Jewish woman and her family with anti-Semitic threats and messages. The Southern Poverty Law Center, along with its Montana co-counsel, filed suit in federal court on behalf of the woman,...
The Southern Poverty Law Center and its allies filed a federal lawsuit against Louisiana officials over the state’s failure to ensure safe voting processes during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. The lawsuit challenges Louisiana’s burdensome requirements surrounding absentee ballots that put the...
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...
President Trump’s revised executive order banning travelers from six predominantly Muslim countries threatened to break up families and prevent Shi’a Muslims from studying their faith with religious scholars. The Southern Poverty Law Center, Muslim Advocates and a coalition of other...
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...
Detained immigrants were forced to work for as little as $1 a day to clean, cook and maintain 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 SPLC filed against the private prison...
Willie Nash was sentenced to a 12-year prison sentence for bringing a cell phone into a county jail. After the Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed Nash’s sentence, the SPLC filed a motion on behalf of Nash, urging the court to rehear his case and arguing that the sentence is a violation of the...
