Immigrant Justice
We’re working to protect the rights of immigrants and their children to ensure they are treated with dignity and fairness.
Immigrants perform some of the hardest, most dangerous jobs in our economy – for the least amount of pay. But they’re routinely denied basic protections in the workplace. In their communities, they’re subjected to racial profiling and harassment by law enforcement – and frequently forced to prove themselves innocent of immigration violations, regardless of their legal status. Their children, many of them U.S. citizens or longtime members of the community, are often denied school enrollment or the educational services required under the law.
Politicians and media figures have only encouraged this environment by spreading false propaganda that blames immigrants for our nation’s problems and by enacting discriminatory laws that stigmatize them.
We’re working to stop workplace exploitation and other human rights abuses – filing strategic lawsuits, exposing civil rights violations, educating the public and the media, and pressing the federal government to act.
We’re also working to help the children of immigrants gain access to a quality education across the Deep South.
Based in Atlanta, our Immigrant Justice Project takes on cases that few private lawyers will accept, seeking systemic reforms and representing victims of injustice.
When vicious anti-immigrant laws were passed across the Southeast, we and other civil rights organizations successfully fought them in multiple states. Our lawsuit, for example, gutted Alabama’s law, widely considered the harshest in the nation.
We’ve successfully fought for immigrant workers cheated out of wages as they cleaned and rebuilt New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. We’ve won justice for guest workers from India defrauded and exploited in a labor trafficking scheme – part of an unprecedented series of cases that ended with a $20 million settlement agreement.
We’ve documented the systematic exploitation of foreign workers who come to this country for temporary jobs under the nation’s H-2 guest worker program, and won justice for thousands who suffered wage theft and other abuses. We’ve exposed the dangerous and exploitive conditions within the poultry industry, which relies on immigrant workers. And we helped block changes within this industry that would have worsened conditions for them.
Our record demonstrates the SPLC’s unwavering commitment toward ensuring justice for the immigrant community, which helps ensure justice for all.
