Florida’s New Law Gives State Officials Sweeping Authority To Designate Any Group a Terrorist Organization

On July 1, a new Florida law took effect granting a small circle of state officials the authority to brand any group in America — foreign or domestic — a terrorist organization, dissolve it, strip it of state funding, and expel university students who support it. Hours after it took effect, Governor Ron DeSantis announced he’d received a recommendation to designate the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Brotherhood and Antifa as domestic terrorist organizations, the first real-world test of the law he signed in April.Governor Ron DeSantis initially signed HB 1471 in April at the University of South Florida in Tampa, calling it “the strongest action Florida has ever taken to protect its people from this influence.” The courts, the civil liberties bar, and at least one federal judge are already preparing to test that claim. The mechanics are straightforward: Florida’s top law enforcement official proposes a designation, the governor and three Cabinet members vote to approve it, and the label takes effect, with no independent judicial finding required beforehand. A targeted organization has 30 days to challenge the designation in state court, but dissolution and defunding can begin immediately. The law also bars Florida courts from enforcing any provision of religious or foreign law — with explicit reference to Sharia — that would violate constitutional rights.A companion measure, HB 1473, shields the evidence behind any designation from public records disclosure, meaning a targeted group may never learn exactly what it was accused of doing.The law, however, has since generated a parallel legal battle. The Eleventh Circuit is now weighing the DeSantis administration’s bid to overturn a federal judge’s injunction that blocked the governor’s earlier executive order designating CAIR a terrorist organization. The administration has also moved to have that judge removed from the case entirely. CAIR did not wait to see how that plays out. The group filed an emergency motion in federal court seeking to block the pending designation, arguing it violates the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause — a second, separate case from the one challenging DeSantis’s original executive order, this one aimed squarely at HB 1471 itself. CAIR is represented by the ACLU, the ACLU of Florida, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the firms Akeel & Valentine and Bondurant Mixson & Elmore.“Domestic groups have due process rights. They have First Amendment rights,” Senior Research Fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, Barry Jonas, tells the New York Sun. “When you designate an organization, you come really close to the line, if not crossing the line, of infringing on their ability to speak freely. Foreign Terrorist Organizations don’t have those same rights; the Constitution doesn’t apply to them in the same way.”If a state can brand Americans a terrorist organization in secret — without a judge, without disclosing the evidence, and before any court has ruled — what, exactly, separates the instrument of law from an instrument of political will?”A Law Born From a Blocked Executive OrderThe legislation did not emerge from a vacuum. On December 8, 2025, Mr. DeSantis signed an executive order designating the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations.On March 5, United States District Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction blocking that order, writing that the First Amendment bars a governor from using executive power to coerce third parties into cutting ties with a civil rights organization, and that the designation likely usurped the federal government’s exclusive authority over terrorist classifications.With his executive action halted by the courts, Mr. DeSantis turned to the legislature. Emails obtained by the Tampa Bay Times showed that staffers in his office wrote an original draft of the Senate companion bill — the new statute effectively attempting through legislation what a federal judge said the governor could not do by executive order alone.CAIR-Florida’s executive director, Hiba Rahim, condemned the law as a “deeply-flawed framework” that “can attack any organization that dares to dissent.” The group’s legal director, Omar Saleh, characterized it as an effort to “codify DeSantis’s illegal executive order,” adding: “They know they’re illegal, and they want to employ a chilling effect.”Following the bill signing, CAIR’s legal director said the existing court injunction blocking DeSantis’s executive order means the law would not directly affect CAIR for now, but warned it would affect other Muslim organizations in Florida and that litigation is an option. The DeSantis administration has since taken the fight to the Eleventh Circuit, seeking to overturn Judge Walker’s injunction. It has also moved to have Mr. Walker removed from the case, arguing his written order, in which he stated that “the First Amendment bars the governor from continuing the troubling trend of using an executive office to make a political statement at the expense of others’ constitutional rights,” shows he cannot fairly adjudicate the matter. CAIR has said it will file a separate lawsuit targeting the new law if the governor moves against it under HB 1471. “I believe that if this law is implemented as intended, it will inevitably violate the Constitution,” Executive Director of the Tallahassee-based First Amendment Foundation, Bobby Block, tells the Sun. “The Fifth Amendment guarantees due process, the right to a fair trial, and to face your accuser, and this law allows for punishment without those protections.”He warns that because the law targets associations, speech, and political activity, it raises serious First Amendment concerns, including viewpoint discrimination. ““The lack of safeguards — no judicial or legislative oversight — means the law can be easily weaponized,” Mr. Block continues. “Individuals may not even know the basis on which they are being designated.”The question of reachSupporters of the law argue the focus is squarely on conduct, not ideology. The bill’s House sponsor, Rep. Hillary Cassel, said the measure ensures taxpayer dollars are not used to support terrorism and argued that “advocacy, lobbying, litigating, protesting, and organizing do not meet this definition” of terrorism.House floor supporters echoed that framing: Rep. Jeff Holcomb of Spring Hill, a Navy veteran, declared the bill “quite possibly one of the most important bills that you’ll vote on,” underscoring the state’s willingness to act as a basic test of whether Florida could protect its residents. Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, now running to succeed Mr. DeSantis in the governor’s mansion, offered the administration’s bottom line at the signing: “We will designate, defund and dissolve people who don’t stand for our values.”Mr. DeSantis himself cited Antifa and Tren de Aragua as groups that could fall within the law’s scope. The bill passed the House 80-25 and cleared the Senate 25-11.Legal experts warn, however, that the law’s language is not confined to any particular ideology or organizational type — and that is precisely the problem.Mr. Jonas draws a sharp distinction between foreign groups like al Qaeda or ISIS, whose violence is unambiguous, and domestic organizations.“The question becomes: if a domestic group is designated, is it being designated for political reasons, or because it truly is a terrorist group?” he ponders, using a pointed illustration to explain where domestic terrorism law can reach beyond existing statutes.“The KKK hangs a person. You can charge them with murder. But what you can’t charge is the guy who makes the robes they wear when committing the hanging,” he explains. “If the KKK were designated as a domestic terrorist organization, you could then go after the person who makes the robes.”The question, he says, is whether closing that gap “justifies doing something that comes very close to crossing the line of violating constitutional protections.”Expert on Islamic extremism and executive director at The American Center for South Yemen Studies, Fernando Carvajal, tells the Sun the Antifa angle is largely political theater.“The Antifa issue won’t go far, and courts should shut it down because at the end [the United States government] has no substantial argument against Antifa,” Mr. Carvajal surmises.CAIR, he contends, is the real target — the law’s primary function being to “disrupt its activities and halt its expansion” and to “rile in legal challenges to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim legislation in Red States.” He describes the Florida and Texas efforts as “test cases for the MAGA White House.”In Texas, a parallel effort has already produced concrete consequences. Every accredited private Islamic school in the state was initially blocked from participating in the state’s $1 billion voucher program after acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock determined they had used an accreditor whose member schools had hosted events organized by CAIR, which Governor Greg Abbott designated a terrorist organization in November 2025. Federal litigation forced a more complete reversal than initially reported: the Texas comptroller’s office announced on March 31 that it had approved all eligible Islamic schools that applied to participate in the program. Litigation continues, with a full court hearing on the constitutional questions scheduled, and CAIR’s lawsuit against Mr. Abbott over the terrorist designation remains pending. “My guess is that if Florida’s statute is upheld as constitutional, then you could see other states following suit,” he observes.The ACLU of Florida also cautioned that officials could use the legislation to impose “the consequential, stigmatizing designation of ‘domestic terrorist’ without clear standards or adequate due process protections,” calling it “a recipe for injustice.”Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former United Nations coordinator for sanctions and threat assessment on ISIS and al-Qaeda, Edmund Fitton-Brown, has taken the opposite view — arguing that Florida and Texas are engaged in “the most serious effort yet by U.S. authorities to address the threat posed by the Brotherhood,” and that legal challenges amount to “activist lawfare.”Mr. DeSantis has said he anticipates legal challenges and believes the state will prevail. What is certain is that the constitutional test now coming will stretch well beyond Florida’s borders — and well beyond any single religion.“This is not a partisan issue. It is a constitutional one,” Mr. Block adds. “Removing due process and transparency does not create better government; it creates the risk of authoritarianism.”

Florida’s New Law Gives State Officials Sweeping Authority To Designate Any Group a Terrorist Organization

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