(12/16/2025) Eight days after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order branding the Council on American-Islamic Relations a “foreign terrorist organization,” CAIR did exactly what it promised. It sued.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations Foundation and CAIR-Florida filed a federal lawsuit late Monday in Tallahassee, asking a judge to declare the executive order unlawful and unconstitutional and to block its enforcement. The suit names DeSantis directly and challenges the state’s authority to designate any organization as a foreign terrorist group — a power that belongs to the federal government, not to governors.

The lawsuit argues that the designation is defamatory and unconstitutional, violating CAIR’s rights to free speech, due process, and equal protection under the law. CAIR — the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, founded in 1994 with chapters in more than two dozen cities — has never been designated a terrorist organization by the United States government.

DeSantis welcomed the lawsuit. When his press secretary was contacted for comment, she referred reporters to the governor’s social media posts, where DeSantis said he looked forward to a trial. “I look forward to discovery — especially the CAIR finances,” he wrote.

The response was telling. DeSantis treated the lawsuit not as a legal threat but as a political opportunity — a chance to put CAIR’s internal operations on trial in the public eye, regardless of whether his executive order could survive constitutional scrutiny.

But the lawsuit is not just about the executive order. It is about what came after it.

On December 8, the same day he signed the order, DeSantis posted the designation on X and then followed it with a second post directed at Florida lawmakers: “Members of the FL Legislature are crafting legislation to stop the creep of sharia law, and I hope that they codify these protections for Floridians against CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood in their legislation.” At a press conference, he called the executive order “kind of the beginning” and predicted “statutory codification.”

That means CAIR is now fighting on two fronts. In federal court, it is challenging the executive order itself — the designation, the directive to deny state resources, the material support provisions. But in the legislature, lawmakers are preparing to do exactly what DeSantis asked: turn the executive order into permanent statute. The lawsuit cannot stop a bill.

The broader pattern is unmistakable. In October, Rep. Hillary Cassel filed the “No Shari’a Act” on the anniversary of October 7. In her own words, she framed the legislation as an act of solidarity with Israel. Attorney General James Uthmeier called for stripping voucher funding from Islamic schools. Now the governor has added an executive-branch weapon to the legislative arsenal — and he has explicitly asked the legislature to make it permanent.

Florida is not the only state where this fight is playing out. CAIR filed a similar federal lawsuit against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott after he issued a proclamation in November banning members of CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood from purchasing land in the state. That case is ongoing.

The Florida lawsuit sets the stage for what could be one of the most significant First Amendment cases involving Muslim civil rights in recent memory. At stake is not just whether a governor can unilaterally label a civil rights organization a terrorist group — but whether the entire machinery of state government can be redirected to target a religious community and the organizations that represent it.

For Florida’s estimated 500,000 Muslim residents, the legal battle has formally begun. But the political battle — the one DeSantis started when he called his executive order “the beginning” — is accelerating on a separate track. And the 2026 legislative session opens on January 13.