The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group, said on Tuesday that it was under investigation by the Justice Department over its past use of paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups.
Bryan Fair, the interim chief executive of the group, said in a video that the Trump administration had “made no secret of who they want to protect and who they want to destroy.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center is best known for investigating hate groups, particularly the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacy organizations, over decades. In recent years, Republicans have accused the group of unfairly targeting conservative and Christian organizations and labeling them as extremists.
In his statement, Mr. Fair said the group no longer worked with paid informants but that those informants had “risked their lives to infiltrate and inform on the activities of our nation’s most radical and violent extremist groups.” That work, he insisted, saved lives.
“We will not be intimidated into silence or contrition, and we will not abandon our mission,” Mr. Fair said.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The center had for many years provided information and tips to local law enforcement and the F.B.I.
Late last year, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, announced that the bureau was severing its ties with the group, calling it a “partisan smear machine” because of its use of a “hate map” displaying what it described as anti-government and hate groups. Mr. Patel also cut his agency’s ties with the Anti-Defamation League, a group that fights antisemitism.
Conservative criticism of the Southern Poverty Law Center intensified after the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in September at a public speaking event in Utah. A 2024 report from the center included a description of Mr. Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA, which called the group a “case study of the hard right.”
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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