Florida Cabinet turns DeSantis’s Brotherhood order into an administrative machine

Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet voted Friday to approve a rule governing how the Florida Department of Law Enforcement designates groups as domestic or foreign terrorist organizations, according to the Florida Phoenix, whose report was carried by both WLRN and WUSF. The procedure took under two minutes. “So, I move to approve the item as presented,” DeSantis said. The rule paves the way for the state to designate the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Brotherhood and Antifa — the same targets DeSantis named in an executive order signed on 9 December 2025, EO 25-244, which the Foundation for Defense of Democracies noted followed Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s designation of 18 November 2025. Both state orders went further than President Trump’s Executive Order 14362 of 24 November 2025, which set in motion an evaluation of foreign Brotherhood branches and did not address U.S.-based groups.

The Texas track shows where Florida’s is headed. On 5 February 2026 Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR and CAIR’s Austin, Houston and DFW chapters to bar them from operating in the state. CAIR — a nonprofit founded in 1994 with 25 chapters nationally, per Stanford Law School’s Legal Aggregate — announced constitutional challenges to both the Texas and Florida designations. At the federal level, State designated the Lebanese, Jordanian and Egyptian Brotherhood chapters on 13 January 2026 as a first step under EO 14362, and the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood on 9 March, citing upwards of 20,000 fighters contributed to the Sudan war. An Egyptian Brotherhood official told Al Jazeera the group would “pursue all legal avenues to challenge” the January designations; no such filing has surfaced.

Assessment: Note what the two minutes bought. An executive order is a governor asserting a conclusion, and courts review it as speech-adjacent state action. A Cabinet-approved FDLE rule creates a process — findings, criteria, a record — which pushes litigation onto administrative-law terrain where deference runs toward the agency. That is the point. Read the thinness of the sourcing too: three mastheads, one Mitch Perry byline. This is one reporting shop, not three confirmations. And the gap that keeps widening is on the other side: eight months after the federal designations, the Brotherhood’s promised legal challenge remains an announcement, while the American state machinery accumulates procedure.