Florida adopts the rule that lets it brand CAIR and the Brotherhood, but designates no one yet

The rule change was announced on Thursday 10 September, and the vote came the following day. In a procedure that took less than two minutes, Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet approved a rule governing how the Florida Department of Law Enforcement designates groups as domestic or foreign terrorist organisations, according to the News Service of Florida copy carried by WLRN, WUSF and WUWF. The rule establishes that the state’s Chief of Domestic Security — currently FDLE Commissioner Mark Glass — will notify the governor and Cabinet of plans to designate an organisation. It does not itself designate anyone. The approval paves the way for the state to move against the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Brotherhood and Antifa, more than two months after DeSantis said he had received Glass’s recommendations. The statutory authority is HB 1471, passed earlier this year, which empowers the FDLE chief to label organisations on evidence of specific criteria.

Two sentences from the teleconference are worth holding on to. Glass said he knew “there are imminent dangers to public health, safety, and welfare” from foreign and domestic terrorist groups — the statutory hook for an emergency rule rather than an ordinary one. DeSantis said: “So, I move to approve the item as presented.” Litigation is already running. In July, the ACLU, the ACLU of Florida and two other legal organisations, representing CAIR and CAIR Florida, filed suit in the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida challenging the constitutionality of the underlying legislation; the filing was reported at the time by the Washington Times and Bloomberg Law. No ruling has been reported. Florida is following a track Texas opened in December 2025, when Governor Greg Abbott designated CAIR and the Brotherhood and Attorney General Ken Paxton sued both.

Assessment: Read the sequence, not the headline. Florida has built a conveyor belt and switched it on; nothing has come off it. The unexplained gap — recommendations in July, procedure in September, notices never — suggests the state knows the weakest point is the one Glass articulated out loud. “Imminent danger” is the phrase that converts a controversial rule into an emergency rule, and it is the first sentence plaintiffs' counsel in the Northern District will quote back. Watch for a preliminary-injunction motion rather than for designations. Note also the divergence from Washington: the federal executive has moved chapter by chapter under EO 14362, while the states designate the organisation whole. Those are different legal theories, and only one has been tested.