DeSantis brands civil rights groups, including CAIR, ‘terrorists’ under sweeping new Florida law
A power normally held by Washington now rests with governor and his cabinet, with no independent check
TALLAHASSEE (MNTV) — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has designated a slate of organizations as terrorist groups under a new state law that hands his administration a power normally reserved for the federal government — and used it first against the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization.
Announcing the designations in Tampa, DeSantis named the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Brotherhood, antifa, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and unnamed groups he tied to drug cartels.
He defended the move as a necessary security measure. The law, written in the governor’s office and effective this week, empowers the Florida Department of Law Enforcement — an agency whose head he appoints — to decide which organizations count as terrorist entities.
The consequences reach directly onto university campuses.
Designated groups are barred from receiving any public funding, and students who associate with or voice support for them can face discipline up to expulsion.
That places the state’s coercive power behind the policing of political speech at exactly the sites where protest over Gaza, foreign policy, and racial justice has been most intense.
CAIR has rejected the designation outright and says it will sue, calling the law overbroad and politically driven. The organization has beaten back similar state actions before, and a federal court already blocked an earlier designation attempt by DeSantis over problems with his authority and due process.
To justify targeting CAIR, DeSantis reached back to decades-old federal cases involving other organizations, arguing that alleged indirect financial or organizational ties are enough to establish grounds for designation.
That reasoning stretches liability far beyond established federal counterterrorism standards, which require an organization to be linked to violent or coercive criminal acts meant to intimidate or harm civilians.
Final approval rests with the governor and his cabinet, with no independent oversight.
The framework gives a single elected official the authority to brand advocacy organizations as terrorists, cut off their funding, and reach into universities to punish students who agree with them — a structure civil liberties groups warn is built to chill dissent and could be turned next on any movement a sitting governor opposes.
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