Washington Designated Three Foreign Chapters While Texas and Florida Move Against Organisations at Home
The federal architecture names Brotherhood chapters overseas. The litigation that will decide what the word covers inside the United States is running in state courts, and the load-bearing documents are still unread.
Executive Order 14362, signed in November 2025, is written against chapters rather than against the Muslim Brotherhood as a single entity — a choice recorded in its own title, “Designation of Certain Muslim Brotherhood Chapters as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists,” and read the same way by the compliance trackers that law firms publish for clients. Execution came about seven weeks later. On 13 January 2026, according to the Counter Extremism Project’s tracker and the State and Treasury releases of that date, the Lebanese, Jordanian and Egyptian chapters were designated, with State also naming the Lebanese chapter’s leader. The chapter count and the entity count are not the same number, and the second one is not yet established here. A separate Treasury action in late July, “Treasury Disrupts Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas Financial Networks,” carries the individuals, jurisdictions and authorities that would fix it.
The domestic fight is a different instrument. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced suit against the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations on 5 February 2026, seeking to stop both from operating in the state, following an earlier action involving CAIR announced on 23 December 2025. The state’s petition is public as a PDF on the Attorney General’s own site; its specific factual allegations connecting CAIR to the Brotherhood are the evidentiary spine of every US chapter-mapping claim, and this desk has not read them. In Florida, the ACLU announced on 4 July 2026 that Muslim civil rights nonprofits had sued state officials to prevent a designation the plaintiffs describe as threatening their existence. That characterisation comes from a party to the case. Florida’s own designation order — its scope, its authority, the number of entities it reaches — has not been located.
Governor Ron DeSantis welcomed an earlier lawsuit challenging CAIR’s designation, Florida Phoenix reported on 9 December 2025. The Knight First Amendment Institute set out the constitutional objection on 2 February 2026 under the heading “Red State Governors Are Designating Civil Rights Groups as Terrorists.” What nobody in the retrievable record supplies is a count: how many US states have now issued Brotherhood- or CAIR-related designations, and under which statutory authority each was issued. Without that number, the shape of the domestic campaign is being described from its two loudest cases.
Assessment: Note which venue is doing the legal work. The executive order buys foreign-policy effect at the price of narrowness; it reaches chapters in Beirut, Amman and Cairo and says nothing operative about an American nonprofit. State attorneys general have the opposite trade: no foreign-policy standing, direct reach into domestic organisations, and a much weaker evidentiary threshold to clear before a press release. That asymmetry is why the pending federal bills matter to the litigants and why the Texas petition, not the executive order, is the document to read. Distrust both sides' framing of Florida until the state’s order itself is in hand; right now it is known only through the people suing over it.