Florida approved a route to designating CAIR in under two minutes, and the courts have not caught up

On 11 September the Florida Cabinet, with Governor Ron DeSantis, approved a process to designate the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other organisations as domestic terrorist groups. The Florida Phoenix, whose Mitch Perry filed the original report syndicated across the state’s public radio network, clocked the procedure at less than two minutes. What was approved is a process, not a designation — a distinction that will be blurred in most coverage of it. The backdrop: DeSantis attempted to designate CAIR by executive order in December 2025; CAIR Florida challenged it in March 2026 and a federal judge issued a temporary injunction; and in early July the ACLU, the ACLU of Florida, the Southern Poverty Law Center and two law firms sued state officials over what the ACLU called an “imminent and baseless” designation. Whether the March injunction survives the new procedure is not established.

Texas is running a parallel construction. On 23 December 2025 the Attorney General’s office announced action to defend “Texas’s lawful designation of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations as foreign terrorist organizations under Texas law,” and on 5 February 2026 Ken Paxton announced a suit in the district court in Collin County against CAIR, three of its Texas chapters and the Brotherhood. (The February filing reaches us via the Charity & Security Network, a nonprofit-sector body explicitly opposed to the designations; the filing itself should be read from county records.) The federal spine is narrower than either state text. Executive Order 14362, signed 24 November 2025 and published in the Federal Register four days later, designates certain Brotherhood chapters — not the organisation. Implementation on 13 January covered Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon; the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood followed on 9 March, with State asserting, without published methodology, that it “has contributed upwards of 20,000 fighters to the war in Sudan.”

One thing has not happened. On the day of the January designations, an Egyptian Brotherhood official told Al Jazeera the group denied “all allegations that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has directed, funded, provided material support for or engaged in terrorism,” called the designation “unsupported by credible evidence,” and said it would pursue all legal avenues. Eight months later, The Files has found no record of any such challenge being filed.

Assessment: A US state purporting to designate a foreign terrorist organisation under state law is the novel legal fact here, and it is more interesting than the politics attached to it. Watch two things. First, the semantic slide: a Cabinet approving a procedure will be reported within a week as a state having banned CAIR, and the injunction question will vanish in the process. Second, the missing lawsuit. A designated organisation that announces it will exhaust legal avenues and then files nothing is either without standing, without US counsel willing to take it, or without the appetite for discovery. Each explanation implies something different about what the designation actually did.