A federal judge is allowing a defamation lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to move forward after the SPLC labeled an immigration reform advocacy group as an “anti-immigrant hate group.”
Judge William Keith Watkins of Alabama’s Middle District Federal Court denied the SPLC’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the Dustin Inman Society (DIS) on March 31.
The Dustin Inman Society, which describes itself as an organization with a mission of “promoting the enforcement of immigration laws in the United States,” has argued that the SPLC’s description of their organization as a “hate group” is defamatory and exposes them to an increased risk of violent retribution.
The Dustin Inman Society is named after Dustin Inman, a 16-year-old Georgia boy killed in a car crash in 2000 that involved an illegal immigrant.
The SPLC is a nonprofit civil rights litigation and advocacy organization that also runs a website purporting to track extremist activity within the United States. The SPLC documents these extremist group labels on its “Hate Map” web portal.
The “Hate Map” web portal includes labels for anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim, antisemitism, Christian identity, general hate, hate music, KKK, male supremacy, Neo-Confederacy, Neo-Nazi, Neo-Völkisch, racist skinhead, radical traditional Catholicism, and white nationalism.
“Because [DIS Founder and President D.A. King] is fighting, working on his legislation through the political process, that is not something we can quibble with, whether we like the law or not” the SPLC allegedly announced in 2011.
Despite this prior decision not to list DIS as a hate group, the SPLC reversed course in February 2018, adding the “anti-immigrant hate group” label. The DIS complaint alleges the SPLC made no change to its criteria for labeling organizations as hate groups and that the DIS had not changed its behavior to warrant such labeling. Instead, the complaint indicates that a motivating factor for the “hate group” label was that the SPLC registered lobbyists in Georgia opposed a “pro-enforcement” immigration bill working through the state legislature.
Violent Threats
The lawsuit argues that other individuals and organizations, like the Family Resource Council and Dr. Charles Murray, have faced violent threats after becoming the subjects of the SPLC’s hate group labels.By denying the SPLC’s motion to dismiss the case, DIS’s defamation lawsuit against the organization can proceed.
NTD News reached out to the SPLC for comment, but the organization did not respond before this article was published.
“SPLC is not taking the posture of an opinion columnist or political pundit, but instead claims it has specialized knowledge of the groups it monitors, holding itself out as having the ability to conduct in depth investigations and offering expertise on the groups it monitors and to make factual determinations regarding the organizations it includes in the ‘hate map’, not mere opinion,” the DIS lawsuit alleges.
The SPLC said the RNC’s resolution gave “comfort to hate groups.” SPLC president and chief executive Margaret Huang said the resolution was designed to “excuse the Trump administration’s history of working with individuals and organizations that malign entire groups of people—including Black Lives Matter advocates, immigrants, Muslims and the L.G.B.T.Q. community—with dehumanizing rhetoric.”
SPLC Lawyer
Last month, a lawyer for the SPLC was charged with domestic terrorism after he was arrested alongside anti-police activists at a demonstration opposing the construction of a new police training facility in Atlanta, Georgia.Videos from the incident showed demonstrators throwing rocks and fireworks at police officers, and several pieces of construction equipment were set on fire.
The SPLC said the lawyer arrested during that protest event was working as a legal observer who was working on behalf of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) at the time.