The ACLU returns to the judge who already blocked Florida once over CAIR

The litigation predates the vote. Under HB 1471, CAIR filed suit in the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida in Tallahassee, arguing that the Governor is violating the First Amendment and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case is docketed as CAIR-Foundation, Inc. and CAIR Florida, Inc. v. DeSantis et al., and is tracked by both the ACLU and the Knight First Amendment Institute. Named defendants, per WUSF, are DeSantis, Florida Department of Law Enforcement chief Mark Glass — whose title the sources give variously as Executive Director and Commissioner — and the state’s 20 elected State Attorneys. Glass, as Florida’s domestic security head, issues the recommendations to name groups as terrorist organisations. Following the 29 September vote the ACLU filed to block it, in a release headed “Muslim Civil Rights Organizations in Florida Urge Court to Block Unconstitutional Terrorism Designation.”

Florida lost the first round. Modern Diplomacy reports that “on March 4, 2026, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the executive order against CAIR,” finding CAIR substantially likely to succeed on its constitutional claim; the ACLU’s own account corroborates that an injunction issued in early March. The phrase “blatantly unconstitutional” circulating with that account is the ACLU’s characterisation, not the court’s. Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, is reported by WUSF as having said the organisation, representing CAIR-Florida, intended to seek a preliminary injunction against the designation. The architecture the state is working against is also worth noting: federal practice since January 2026 has designated specific national Brotherhood branches — Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, with the Sudanese Brotherhood added in March — rather than the organisation as an abstraction.

Assessment: The state’s manoeuvre is legible. An executive order fell in March on procedural and First Amendment grounds; the same designation has now been routed through a statutory cabinet vote, which cures the question of who had authority to act. It does not obviously cure the speech problem, and that is the whole of the next ruling. Watch the definitional hole: no chapter, no entity, no registration number for “the Muslim Brotherhood” has surfaced in any retrieved coverage. Washington designates branches. Florida designated an idea — and attached criminal material-support liability to it. Nobody has yet said who, concretely, is exposed.