A judge declined to block Florida’s terror label on CAIR. The state said he upheld it.

Chief U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor of the Northern District of Florida declined to enjoin the state’s designation of CAIR and CAIR-Florida as domestic terrorist organizations, writing that the groups “have not shown they are likely to succeed” on their due process claims, according to Religion News Service. Accounts differ on the day: Religion News Service refers to a 4 November ruling and says the judge ruled Wednesday, while WLRN, WGCU and others report a Thursday denial; 4 November was a Wednesday, 5 November a Thursday. On the statute’s reach, Winsor wrote that “It does not say what a (designated terrorist organization) can or cannot say” — the parenthetical is WLRN’s expansion of an acronym. Religion News Service, alone among the accounts reviewed, reports one carve-out: state prosecutors may not use the law against the organisations, their employees or their lawyers in connection with legal services.

The designation took effect on 5 November and CAIR-Florida posted a notice saying it had “suspended our operations in Florida because of Governor DeSantis and other state officials' baseless and unconstitutional enforcement of the state’s unprecedented new ‘domestic terrorist organization' laws against us.” Hiba Rahim, named by Florida Phoenix and WFLA as the chapter’s executive director, said the law has “profoundly disturbing parallels to authoritarian states” and that branding Muslim nonprofits as terrorist groups will have “devastating consequences for our rights, our supporters, and the communities we serve.” The American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center are litigating for the groups; ACLU senior counsel Ashley Gorski confirmed to Religion News Service that an appeal is planned. Religion News Service notes flatly that Florida has never indicted or convicted either organisation under any criminal law.

The vehicle is HB 1471, passed in 2026 and signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, which DeSantis described on X on 29 September as “the anti-sharia law signed earlier this year.” It lets the state’s chief of domestic security — ex officio the FDLE commissioner — designate organisations subject to ratification by the governor and a three-member cabinet, a structure Florida Phoenix describes as five state executive officials able to designate and dissolve groups “without filing any legal charges or submitting their case to a jury.” Consequences written into the statute include bans on state and local funding, expulsion of Florida College System students who “promote” a designated group, reporting on student-visa holders who do so, and possible dissolution. The cabinet voted the designations on 29 September, naming the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR, CAIR-Florida and Antifa.

Assessment: Three framings are now loose in the coverage and all three are wrong. Attorney General James Uthmeier posted on X that “a federal court upheld Florida’s Domestic Terrorist Organization law” and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said a court had “affirmed” the designations; the order denied preliminary relief on a likelihood-of-success test and resolved nothing on the merits. Headlines reading “shuts down” overstate CAIR’s own word, which is suspension. And the Florida action is not the federal one: Executive Order 14362 of November 2025 reaches named foreign Brotherhood chapters in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, while Florida has designated a US-incorporated nonprofit. Watch the Eleventh Circuit, where this appeal and the state’s appeal of Judge Mark Walker’s March injunction against the earlier executive order are converging — two federal judges in one state, opposite outcomes, eleven months apart.