Florida brands CAIR, the Brotherhood and antifa terrorist groups under a law written this summer

The vote, chaired by Governor Ron DeSantis and carried by the governor plus four Cabinet members, used HB 1471, signed in July 2026, which lets the state’s head of domestic security — the commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, currently Mark Glass — recommend terrorist designations to the governor and Cabinet. More than 90 organisations already on the US Foreign Terrorist Organization list were swept onto the new state list in the same motion, among them the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa, Gulf and Northeast cartels. Three were not on any federal list: the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Brotherhood and antifa. “Today we officially designated the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR and Antifa as terrorist organizations per the anti-sharia law signed earlier this year,” DeSantis wrote on X at 3:07pm. Attorney General James Uthmeier, in a video the same day: “Today, Florida drew a line on terrorism.”

JNS reports the vote was supported by an agenda document running more than 400 pages, asserting “there is substantial evidence that CAIR is engaging in terrorist activity” and citing the group’s status as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial. The Files has not obtained the primary packet; the page count and the quoted assertion rest on JNS alone. The co-conspirator listing is a 2007–08 artefact and has carried every CAIR designation attempt since. This is Florida’s second try: DeSantis designated CAIR and the Brotherhood by executive order in December 2025, and US District Judge Mark Walker blocked it on First Amendment grounds. Uthmeier appealed to the Eleventh Circuit on 20 April 2026 in a 55-page filing arguing the order “simply designates terrorist organizations in an effort to keep state resources from those designated entities and their material supporters.”

CAIR and CAIR-Florida sued in the Northern District of Florida within hours of the new statutes taking effect on 1 July, represented by the ACLU, the ACLU of Florida, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Akeel & Valentine PLC and Bondurant Mixson & Elmore LLP, seeking a declaration that the designation regime is unconstitutional. Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, told WUSF the organisation would move for a preliminary injunction on behalf of CAIR-Florida on Thursday — today. The ACLU said in a 29 September statement that counsel for CAIR and CAIR-Florida were present at the Cabinet meeting and were not heard; WUSF independently records that the panel took no public comment and offered little of its own. Florida Phoenix notes an earlier attempt faltered in state court partly because implementing regulations had not been written.

Assessment: The question nobody in this week’s coverage answered is what the designation does. Uthmeier’s own April framing — keeping state resources from designated entities and their “material supporters” — describes a procurement and grants instrument, not a criminal one. Whether it creates exposure for donors is the difference between a press release and a legal weapon, and it is answerable from the statute. Two further tests: whether the 400-page packet contains anything on the Brotherhood postdating 2010, and whether other governors now copy the Cabinet-vote mechanism, which exists precisely because the executive-order route was enjoined once. Washington has designated specific Brotherhood chapters; it has never designated CAIR.