Florida Designates Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR, and Antifa as Terrorist Groups

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state cabinet on Tuesday designated the Muslim Brotherhood, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and Antifa as terrorist organizations under a law enacted earlier this year, a move that bars them from public funding and is already facing a First Amendment challenge.

In a Sept. 29 post on X, DeSantis tied the action to what he called “the anti-sharia law” signed earlier this year.

The vote also placed more than 90 federally designated foreign terrorist organizations on Florida’s list, including the Sinaloa, Noreste, and Golfo cartels, Tren de Aragua, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

DeSantis has said CAIR has ties to terror groups. CAIR has denied any such ties.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Florida, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other counsel representing CAIR and CAIR-Florida have challenged the designation in two federal lawsuits, calling it “unconstitutional and baseless.”

The ACLU said that CAIR is the “country’s largest Muslim civil-rights organization.”

“There are simply no legitimate grounds to brand our clients with a reviled label, impose crippling criminal penalties, and force them to shut their doors in Florida,” Hina Shamsi, director of ACLU’s National Security Project, said in a Sept. 29 statement.  

The ACLU said that if courts do not intervene, the designation will become effective on Nov. 5.

“As the country’s leading Muslim civil rights group, CAIR is being targeted not because it poses a threat to public safety, but because doing so serves a political agenda at the expense of Floridians’ rights. CAIR and all U.S. nonprofits have the right to criticize the government, protect religious freedom, and advocate for the causes they believe in,” Shamsi said.

The designations rest on House Bill 1471, which DeSantis signed in April.

At a press conference in April, the governor called the measure “the strongest action Florida has ever taken against terror.”

“We shouldn’t have people in this country that hate this country,” he said. “That’s been a problem for decades.”

In an April 6 statement, he said the measure strengthened protections “against the application of foreign and religious laws, including Sharia law, that violate constitutional rights and establishing new safeguards against terrorist organizations operating in Florida.”

The statute bars Florida courts from “enforcing a foreign judgment or order that is the result of the application of foreign law or religious law which is inconsistent with a person’s constitutional rights or otherwise violates public policy.”

The law means that institutions that use taxpayer dollars to promote designated organizations risk losing state funding. Providing material support can bring criminal penalties. Students who advocate for terrorist violence face disciplinary action.

Florida’s designations go further than Washington’s. 

The Trump administration has designated Antifa a domestic terrorist organization and sanctioned three Muslim Brotherhood chapters, but it has not designated the brotherhood as a single group or listed CAIR.

A September 2025 executive order described Antifa as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.”

The order said Antifa recruits, trains, and “radicalizes young Americans” to engage in violence and the suppression of political activity, and “employs elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives, conceal its funding sources and operations in an effort to frustrate law enforcement, and recruit additional members.”

The movement has no central leadership or official spokesperson.

The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, was not designated by Washington as a single organization.

In January, the White House designated three of its chapters for support of Gaza-based terror group Hamas. The Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood, also known as Al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah, was listed as a foreign terrorist organization and a specially designated global terrorist.

The Egyptian and Jordanian branches were also listed as specially designated global terrorists for material support to Hamas.

Last year, CAIR filed a federal lawsuit against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott after he also designated the Muslim advocacy group as a foreign terrorist organization and a transnational criminal organization.

Kimberly Hayek and Matthew Vadum contributed to this report.