The Southern Poverty Law Center said it’s facing a criminal investigation from the Trump administration that could lead to charges against the civil rights group or some of its employees.

In a statement, the civil rights nonprofit organization’s CEO, Bryan Fair, said that due to SPLC’s history of fighting white supremacy and other injustices, it’s “unsurprised” to be “targeted” by this administration.

“They have made no secret of who they want to protect and who they want to destroy,” Fair said.

He noted that FBI Director Kash Patel previously said the bureau would sever its ties with the group. Patel wrote in October that SPLC had “long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine” and that the group’s “so-called ‘hate map’ has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence.”

Fair also noted that House Republicans held a hearing into his group. The December hearing in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government was titled, “Partisan and Profitable: The SPLC’s Influence on Federal Civil Rights Policy.” The hearing description said it was held to examine the group’s “coordinated efforts with the Biden-Harris Administration to target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association” and to “examine SPLC’s history, funding, and work to silence conservative and Christian Americans for their beliefs.”

Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September increased conservative pressure against the group, which had called his Turning Point USA (TPUSA) organization “a case study of the hard right.”

SPLC’s report on the subject called Kirk’s TPUSA “a well-funded, hard-right organization with links to Southern Poverty Law Center-identified hard-right extremists and a tremendous amount of influence in conservative politics.” SPLC said TPUSA’s main strategy was “sowing and exploiting fear that white Christian supremacy is under attack by nefarious actors, including immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community and civil rights activists.”

At the House hearing in December, one of the witnesses was Andrew Sypher, TPUSA’s executive vice president of field operations. Sypher said that Kirk had warned before his murder that SPLC’s “Hate Map” designation would put Turning Point “in the crosshairs,” which Sypher said had “proved prophetic.”

SPLC’s Fair said in his statement that the administration’s focus “appears to be on the SPLC’s prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups.” He said their informants have “risked their lives to infiltrate and inform on the activities of our nation’s most radical and violent extremist groups.”

The Justice Department, which since Trump returned to office has targeted perceived foes of the president and conservatives, had no immediate comment.

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