MEFILES

Ten months after the executive order, the American designation drive has moved from the podium to the docket

Four Muslim Brotherhood chapters have been designated since January. The expansion has since slowed into litigation, while the loudest new claims come from Europe and rest on partisan sourcing.

Executive Order 14362, signed 24 November 2025 and published in the Federal Register on 28 November, Vol. 90, No. 227, p. 55033, designated nothing on signature. It set in motion a process by which certain chapters or subdivisions would be “considered for designation” as Foreign Terrorist Organizations under section 219 of the INA and as specially designated global terrorists under IEEPA and Executive Order 13224 of 23 September 2001, and required the Secretaries of State and the Treasury to submit a joint report to the President within 30 days. The order named chapters in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, which it said “engage in or facilitate and support violence and destabilization campaigns that harm their own regions, United States citizens, and United States interests.” The designations themselves followed on 13 January 2026, in a State Department release covered the same day by Al Jazeera. Sudan’s Muslim Brotherhood was designated on 9 March 2026, in two separate State Department postings whose relationship — duplicate notices, or distinct FTO and SDGT authorities with different sanctions reach — remains unresolved.

Since March the movement has been in courtrooms rather than press releases. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR on 5 February 2026 to stop the groups operating in the state, an action that inverted a suit brought by Texas CAIR chapters against Governor Greg Abbott and Paxton in November 2025, which called the designations unconstitutional. CAIR sued Governor Ron DeSantis and Florida officials over that state’s designation law in early July; on 14 July the Washington Examiner reported that Florida had delayed its designations as the law faced legal challenge. A state pausing under litigation pressure is the most consequential and least covered fact on this file. Two bills that would put designation into statute rather than executive order — H.R.3883 and S.2293, both from the 119th Congress — have not been shown to have moved out of committee.

Europe is where the noise now is, and where the confirmation is thinnest. The Dutch House of Representatives adopted a motion to ban the Brotherhood on 18–19 March 2026, reported as a motion by Geert Wilders; the retrievable sourcing is ISGAP, which publicly commended the vote, alongside Brussels Signal, European Conservative and Breitbart, with no Tweede Kamer motion number traced. A reported French National Assembly vote to designate the Brotherhood on 26 January 2026 rests, in what this desk could retrieve, solely on the Middle East Forum, a partisan outlet; separately Anadolu reported new French financial and administrative sanctions against Brotherhood “entryism,” following Emmanuel Macron’s instruction to government in May 2025. Austria’s Chancellor Christian Stocker called in early September for a constitutional ban on “political Islam” — an amendment requiring a two-thirds Nationalrat majority, with no bill text traced.

Assessment: The shape worth holding onto is an inversion: American expansion decelerating into court calendars precisely as European announcements accelerate. Both halves invite the same error. A motion is not a ban, a joint report is not a designation, and a state law paused by a judge is not a policy. The European file is additionally distorted by sourcing asymmetry — on this beat the campaigning outlets are consistently first and the wires are frequently absent, which means the “ban wave” is being assembled substantially from material no news agency has independently confirmed. Nothing discrete surfaced on this desk in the past seven days. That quiet is itself the reporting: the drive now runs on docket time.

Jordan prosecutes seven former Brotherhood officials while its political wing studies a legal way out

A money-laundering file moved to the Attorney General in January on the same days Washington designated the Jordanian chapter. An Amman think tank has mapped a merger clause that could dissolve the Islamic Action Front into something the designations do not name.

Jordan banned the Muslim Brotherhood on 23 April 2025 after an alleged sabotage plot, as the Times of Israel reported. The ban was less of a rupture than it appeared: Chatham House notes that the Court of Cassation had formally dissolved the group in 2020, “though few steps were taken to implement the measure,” and that the Islamic Action Front, the political wing, “has not been officially banned, though authorities carried out raids on its offices.” The institute reads Amman’s calculation as “cutting Islamist forces down to size without cutting them off entirely” — analyst framing, not government language. The New Arab reported on 22 January 2026 that on 12 January prosecutors in Amman advanced a case against seven former Brotherhood officials to the Attorney General on charges of money laundering and unauthorised fundraising, the accused comprising three senior figures and four administrative staffers, mainly accountants. That detail is single-sourced and has not been matched by Petra, Al-Ghad or Roya.

The timing sat against the US designations of the same week. What follows from it is the question of whether the Islamic Action Front can outlive the label. The Institute of Politics and Society in Amman, writing on 29 November 2025, set out the mechanism: under Article 24 of the parties law a party “may merge with one or more other parties,” which dissolves the legal personality of the merging entities and transfers rights and obligations to a newly formed party, subject to approval by the respective general assemblies, submission to the Independent Election Commission and publication in the Official Gazette. The institute described this as “a flexible political exit strategy enabling the party to reposition itself within a new entity that may not fall within the scope of U.S. evaluation.” Its reference to a 75-day review window does not correspond to the only deadline in the order’s text, which is the 30-day joint report.

Assessment: Two clocks run in Amman and only one is judicial. The criminal file gives the state leverage that a ban decree does not — money-laundering charges attach to individuals, survive appeals better than dissolution orders, and can be paused or pressed as the political weather requires. The merger route is meanwhile a theory until a filing exists: the test is not a think tank paper but a name in the Official Gazette and a submission to the Independent Election Commission, both of which are documented and checkable. Treat the seven-defendant breakdown as one outlet’s reporting until a second confirms it, and note that no charges have been shown to have been filed since January.