Florida approves the machinery for designating CAIR and the Brotherhood in under two minutes

Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet voted on Friday 11 September to approve a rule governing the process by which the state designates domestic terrorist organisations, clearing the way for Florida to name the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Brotherhood and Antifa. DeSantis said the rule followed recommendations he had received from Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Mark Glass; the reporting notes the Cabinet acted more than two months after those recommendations were announced. The Florida Phoenix account, bylined Mitch Perry, describes the proceeding as taking less than two minutes. The same text ran on the public radio stations WUSF, WLRN and WUWF — one report syndicated four times, not four independent confirmations. The vote itself was a public Cabinet proceeding; the two-minute detail and the framing rest on a single newsroom.

The substantive fight is in federal court. DeSantis signed an executive order in December 2025 branding the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR foreign terrorist organisations, following Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who on 18 November 2025 designated both as foreign terrorist organisations and transnational criminal organisations. In early March 2026 the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida granted CAIR a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the Florida order; Nihad Awad, CAIR’s national executive director, said the ruling “serves as a reminder that the Constitution still matters.” In July the ACLU of Florida and the Southern Poverty Law Center sued on First and Fourth Amendment grounds, naming DeSantis among the defendants; the SPLC said that without court intervention CAIR and CAIR Florida faced “imminent danger” of having to close their Florida advocacy work by 8 July. Neither CAIR nor the Brotherhood has been recorded responding to Friday’s vote.

Assessment: Adopting a rule after a court has enjoined an executive order is the standard workaround, and the question the Cabinet did not answer on Friday is whether the new process reaches conduct the March injunction already protects. Watch for two things: whether Florida actually issues a named designation, and whether the plaintiffs go back to the same judge. Until a name is published there is nothing to enjoin — which is also the tactical advantage of a two-minute vote on procedure. Note too that a state designation is not the federal FTO or SDGT machinery, and nothing in this reporting establishes what practical sanction it carries.