Florida designates the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as terrorist groups, effective 5 November
The DeSantis cabinet voted Tuesday under a law that took effect in July, nine months after a federal judge blocked an earlier executive order on the same question.
On Tuesday 29 September, Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet voted to designate the Muslim Brotherhood, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and its state chapter CAIR-Florida, and Antifa as terrorist organizations under Florida law. The same vote applied state designations to roughly 90 organizations already carried on US federal terrorist lists, among them Tren de Aragua, two Mexican cartels and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; al-Qaeda, the Houthis and the Continuity Irish Republican Army were labelled foreign terrorist organizations under state law. The vehicle is HB 1471, which took effect on 1 July. DeSantis described it on X as “the anti-sharia law signed earlier this year.” A 427-page supporting document asserts “there is substantial evidence that CAIR is engaging in terrorist activity” and alleges connections to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The designations take effect 5 November 2026.
The practical effect, as reported by WUSF, WLRN and CBS Miami: the designated groups are barred from public funding and state contracts, may be legally dissolved, and students who support them may be expelled from academic institutions. The ACLU said in a release timestamped 11:30 am on 29 September that when DeSantis and four Cabinet members voted, its counsel stood and asked to be heard on behalf of CAIR and CAIR-Florida, and were refused. Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, said attorneys intended to file on Thursday 1 October for a preliminary injunction; as of this edition the filing was announced but not confirmed. The ground is familiar. On 4 March the Northern District of Florida enjoined DeSantis’s earlier executive order designating CAIR; a fresh federal suit, case 4:25-cv-00516-MW-MJF, was filed the day HB 1471 took effect. Florida officials paused the designation plan in mid-July. The pause ended Tuesday.
Assessment: The 5 November date is the thing to watch, not the vote. Florida has already lost once on this ground and has spent the interval replacing an executive order with a statute and an emergency rule — the architecture of a decision designed to survive judicial review rather than to produce one. Note the gap the designation exploits: the federal government has never designated CAIR, and the four Brotherhood chapters designated since January — Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan — are foreign bodies, not American organisations. State law is being used to reach a target federal instruments cannot. Whether that holds is a First Amendment question, and the answer will arrive before the designations bite.