CAIR branded terrorist with no subpoenas, no charges

Hussam Ayloush runs the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the office that spent the last four years helping Afghan refugees navigate the American legal system after they fled the Taliban. This week his organisation was named, in the same breath as the Muslim Brotherhood and Antifa, a domestic terrorist group by the governor of a state 2,500 miles away.

“It is merely an attempt to create smear and destruction, to silence the most important American Muslim voices in the country when it comes to issues dealing with Israeli abuses and the U.S. funding of those abuses,” Ayloush told The Intercept.

Florida moves first

On 1 July, the day Florida’s new anti-terror law HB 1471 took effect, Governor Ron DeSantis announced he would designate CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood and Antifa as domestic terrorist organisations. Under the law, Florida’s Chief of Domestic Security can make the designation with Cabinet approval. The consequences are concrete: university students who “promote” a designated group face expulsion, schools affiliated with one lose K-12 scholarship funding, and anyone deemed to provide the group “material support” is barred from state contracts, employment or benefits.

Neither CAIR nor the Muslim Brotherhood is designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the federal government. DeSantis tried this once before, by executive order in December 2025, and a federal judge, Mark Walker, blocked it with a temporary injunction in March. The state appealed, then wrote the same designation into statute and announced it again within hours of the law taking effect.

CAIR and CAIR-Florida sued the next day in the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida, represented by the ACLU, the ACLU of Florida and the Southern Poverty Law Center. The complaint says the designation regime “contains no meaningful pre-designation, notice requirement, no evidentiary requirements, no standard of proof, and no requirement of a meaningful hearing before a neutral decisionmaker” and “vests unbridled discretion in Florida’s executive branch to punish, ostracize, and silence civil society organizations.”

“This ruling serves as a reminder that the Constitution still matters,” CAIR’s national executive director Nihad Awad said, referencing the earlier injunction. CAIR Florida’s interim executive director, Hiba Rahim, leads the new suit. Scott McCoy of the SPLC put it plainly: DeSantis “is seeking to unilaterally silence a leading American civil rights nonprofit.”

The federal arm of the same operation

Florida’s move landed alongside a federal thread that had been building for weeks. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted on X in June that his department was demanding action over allegations CAIR and its California and Washington affiliates misused federal grant money, saying “if there is evidence of fraud, abuse, or ties to designated terrorist organizations, we will act.” CAIR national has never received a penny of HHS funding, a fact its national deputy director, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, said Kennedy “would know that if he had spent any amount of time doing research.”

The money in question went through CAIR California and CAIR Washington, both of which received federal health dollars routed via their state governments, more than $27 million sub-granted to CAIR California alone, to run legal services for Afghan refugees who fled the Taliban in 2021. The specific complaint centres on $7.2 million of that HHS-originated funding. It originated with a group called the Intelligent Advocacy Network and was pushed into the political bloodstream by the Middle East Forum, whose own press release takes credit for triggering the HHS action.

Days after an HHS civil rights official sent CAIR California what The Intercept described as an “amicable” letter, one that committed to nothing and never mentioned terrorism, Kennedy went public with claims of a terrorism-linked investigation. As of this week, CAIR’s three entities say they have received no subpoenas and no formal correspondence of any kind. “No subpoenas, no nothing at all,” Mitchell told The Intercept, “just this shot across the bow in the court of public opinion.”

Behind the HHS move sits Representative Chip Roy of Texas, founder of the “Sharia-Free America Caucus,” who led 13 House Republicans in writing to Kennedy demanding CAIR’s debarment over alleged Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood ties, while simultaneously running for Texas attorney general. Roy publicly thanked Kennedy in June for “investigating CAIR’s alleged ties to the groups such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.” Texas governor Greg Abbott had already designated the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organisations in November, banning them from buying land in the state. Days later, President Trump signed an executive order beginning the process of designating certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters abroad as terrorist entities. Three states and one federal department, all moving on the same domestic advocacy group inside eight months, is not coincidence. It is a machine, built for a different war, now aimed at American citizens.

Who actually pays

The people losing something concrete in all this are not Kennedy, DeSantis or Roy. They are the Afghan refugees whose legal aid is now recast as the “fraud” in question, and the Somali Muslim childcare workers in Washington state who came under attack after fraud conspiracy theories about their community spread out of Minnesota, a campaign a GOP megadonor, Leonard Leo, is now bankrolling through an anti-Somali website. Saher Selod of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding said the pattern is familiar: “During election cycles we see the ramping-up of this type of anti-Muslim rhetoric. Muslims have become the bait in this moment.” Hatem Baizan, who teaches ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, was blunter about the intent: “Facts are immaterial for this current administration. The aim is to throw as much dirt as possible to actually get people to distance themselves from CAIR.”

It is worth being precise about what is contested and what is not. CAIR California and CAIR Washington did handle real federal money, state-vetted and audited, and no finding of misuse has been produced by anyone. It is also true that CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007-08 Holy Land Foundation case, a fact its critics recycle every time this comes up, and a fact that produced no charges against CAIR itself. Both things are true. Neither amounts to the case Kennedy, Roy and DeSantis are trying to build in public before they have built one anywhere else.

The Islamophobia in this midterm year is not confined to one party. Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee posted that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand had to apologise after suggesting New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, was supportive of “global jihad.” CAIR itself sued Donald Trump’s first administration to block the Muslim travel ban and has kept litigating against the second. The people it represents did not choose this fight. They are being made to fight it anyway, in a Tallahassee courtroom, while the men making the accusations count votes.