Alabama AG Marshall subpoenaed Southern Poverty Law Center's donor and hate-group records in civil probe

On May 11, 2026, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall announced a civil investigation into the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center and transmitted a civil investigative subpoena requiring the organization to produce records by June 1, 2026. The subpoena demanded the group's donor-disclosure documents, its annual contribution figures from Alabama and beyond, an accounting of its disbursements to informants and the share of its budget spent on them, and — beyond ordinary charitable-solicitation matters — records of any payments to groups or individuals listed in SPLC's "extremist files" or "hate map."

Marshall grounded the inquiry in Alabama's Deceptive Trade Practices Act and state charitable-organization laws, and cited SPLC's pending federal fraud indictment over informant payments as a predicate. He stated, "We have always suspected that they were monetizing hate and trading on race-baiting, it was just a matter of proving it," and described the group as "rotten." The federal indictment supplies a facially conventional donor-deception theory, but the subpoena's demand for records tied to SPLC's hate-group designations reaches into the organization's protected advocacy rather than its solicitation practices. SPLC said it had received notice of the subpoena and was reviewing it.