Every Chapter Washington Has Designated Sits Abroad, and the Senate Bill’s List Stops at the Water’s Edge

Legis1, a congressional tracking service rather than a wire, published a page indexed at roughly one day old under the headline “Senate Panel Will Examine Muslim Brotherhood’s U.S. Operations.” The Files could not retrieve the committee, the date, the witness list, or whether the hearing has been formally noticed. It would be the second Senate examination of the Brotherhood this year; Legis1 separately recorded a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights on 20 May 2026. The object in that headline is different in kind from anything designated to date. The January tranche named the Lebanese chapter and Muhammad Fawzi Taqqosh, and the Egyptian and Jordanian branches; the March tranche named the Sudanese Brotherhood, rationalised by State on violence against civilians in Sudan rather than on Hamas. All of it is extraterritorial.

So is the legislation. S.2293, introduced on 15 July 2025 and referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, defines a “Muslim Brotherhood branch” to include Hamas and Lajnat al-Daawa al-Islamiya by name, plus any affiliated entity operating in a fixed list: Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Egypt, France, Gaza, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, “Judea and Samaria”, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and Yemen — plus any other country the Secretary of State identifies. Thirty-four jurisdictions, five of them NATO members. The United States is not among them. The House companion, H.R.4397, filed by Mario Díaz-Balart with Jared Moskowitz, was ordered reported by Foreign Affairs 35–14 on 3 December 2025, with a CBO estimate on 9 January 2026.

Where domestic enforcement has actually happened, it has happened at state level and under state law. Governor Greg Abbott designated the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations as foreign terrorist organizations and transnational criminal organizations on 18 November 2025, barring both from purchasing land in Texas. “The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear,” Abbott said in the announcement. A governor has no authority under federal law to designate a foreign terrorist organization; the Texas instrument borrows the vocabulary without the statute. An Arabic sidebar in Middle East Online dated 9 December 2025 reported Florida following Texas; The Files has not seen the Florida order.

Assessment: The offshore pattern is not an accident of sequencing. Extraterritorial designation costs the executive branch nothing in constitutional exposure; a domestic chapter finding runs immediately into the First Amendment and into discovery. The Senate bill’s drafters wrote a list of 34 jurisdictions and left their own country off it, which tells you they understood the same thing. Two tests for the hearing, if it is held: whether the witnesses are executive-branch officials or think-tank analysts, and whether anyone is asked why Lebanon drew the criminal statute while Cairo and Amman drew only the blocking order. And a trailed hearing is not a noticed one — this desk has already watched one Brotherhood hearing be listed and called postponed at the same time.