A Court Has Florida’s Terror List on Hold While Texas’s Suit Sits Undecided

Florida is the further along. Governor Ron DeSantis issued an executive order in December 2025 applying a terrorism label to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and legislation backing that order was signed on 6 April 2026. CAIR sued in federal court. CBS Miami reported that a court then put the state’s designated list of terror groups on hold, and that Florida had asked for additional time to respond. The Files could not obtain the case name, the court, the judge or the text of the order, and dates the CBS report only to roughly mid-July 2026 on the strength of its own retrieval; the stay should be treated as reported rather than read. CAIR has denied engaging in terrorist activity. Florida Phoenix reported on 9 December 2025 that DeSantis welcomed the lawsuit when it was filed.

Texas ran the same play through its attorney general. Ken Paxton announced on 5 February 2026 that he had sued the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR, and CAIR’s Austin, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth chapters in District Court in Collin County, seeking to bar them from operating in the state, after taking preliminary legal action on 23 December 2025 to defend Governor Greg Abbott’s November 2025 designation barring the groups and their affiliates from acquiring land. Six months on, The Files has no docket entry showing a motion to dismiss or a decision. The federal instruments, by contrast, reach abroad: Executive Order 14362 of 24 November 2025 designated nobody, as the Charity and Security Network noted, and the designations that followed on 13 January and 9 March 2026 named the Lebanese, Egyptian, Jordanian and Sudanese branches. Stanford Law School and the Knight First Amendment Institute both argued in early February that the state designations borrow the vocabulary of federal terrorism law in order to prompt federal action.

Assessment: The division of labour is the story. Federal instruments have so far attached to foreign chapters and one named foreign leader; the instruments that attach to a domestic non-profit founded in 1994 are state-level, and those are the ones in front of judges. That asymmetry is not an accident of drafting — a designation reaching a US organisation invites a First Amendment record, and the Florida stay is what that record looks like early. Distrust the momentum framing in either direction: a stay is not a merits ruling, and The Files has neither order in hand. Watch whether this week’s Senate testimony supplies a predicate the state suits have not sustained.