The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group that has long tracked hate groups, said on Tuesday that it was under investigation by the Justice Department over its past use of paid informants to infiltrate extremist organizations.
Bryan Fair, the group’s interim chief executive, 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 Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Southern Poverty Law Center was formed in 1971 in Alabama and is best known for investigating groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacy organizations. In recent years, Republicans have accused the group of unfairly targeting conservative and Christian organizations, labeling them as extremists.
The criminal investigation comes as the Trump administration pushes to counter what it calls anti-Christian and anti-conservative bias in the government. Last week, the Justice Department issued a report highly critical of how the Biden administration prosecuted anti-abortion activists under a law meant to safeguard access to abortion providers and church services.
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. “We will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”
The center had for many years provided information and tips to local law enforcement and the F.B.I.
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.”
In October, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, announced that the bureau was severing its ties with the group. He said the organization “long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine.” He singled out their use of a “hate map” displaying what it described as anti-government and hate groups, saying the map unfairly targeted “mainstream Americans.” Around the same time, Mr. Patel also cut his agency’s ties with the Anti-Defamation League, a group that fights antisemitism.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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