Debates over terrorism law have long revolved around the actions of the executive branch of the U.S. government, particularly the presidency. Therefore, it’s easy to overlook the fact that a different set of political actors is now dangerously asserting the power to designate domestic civil society groups as terrorists: red state governors.

Late last year, the governors of Texas and Florida issued orders purporting to designate the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights group, as a terrorist organization. These measures potentially subject the organization and its supporters to a range of other consequences, such as restrictions on land sales (Texas) or government contracts and employment opportunities (Florida).

CAIR has already sued in both states, and aspects of these orders are almost certainly unlawful. Like federal terrorism laws, these state measures chill entirely lawful speech and association, but they do so with respect to an entirely domestic civil rights group. Furthermore, by restricting U.S. persons and entities from certain property rights—areas long regulated by states as much as by Washington—they portend a significant expansion of authoritarianism. While these orders in many aspects ape Washington’s war on terrorism, they can also be seen as a different form of authoritarianism from below, driven by some states.

We’ll first explain these executive orders, argue that they go beyond already problematic federal terrorism designations, note their legal infirmities, and end with the stakes of this state-led expansion of terrorism law.

The Texas and Florida Orders

Both the Texas and Florida orders “designate” CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations. CAIR is a U.S. nonprofit organization, founded in 1994, with 25 chapters around the country and a long history of countering anti-Muslim discrimination. The Muslim Brotherhood is a decentralized, transnational social and political Muslim organization founded in Egypt in the 1920s. Each order accuses CAIR of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, notes that federal prosecutors named CAIR one of hundreds of “unindicted coconspirators” in a nearly 20-year-old terrorism financing case, and claims that various CAIR-affiliated individuals promoted terrorism. CAIR has never been charged with criminal activity, and argues that these measures are retaliation for its pro-Palestine advocacy—including three First Amendment lawsuits against Governor Abbott.

The Texas and Florida orders are broadly similar to each other but distinct in their implications. Governor Greg Abbott’s proclamation purports to designate the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as “foreign terrorist organizations” (FTOs) and “transnational criminal organizations” (TCOs). FTOs under Texas law should not be confused with the longstanding federal category of the same name. (For clarity, we’ll refer to Texas law FTOs as TX-FTOs). In 2023, Governor Abbott signed S.B. 1900 into law, which created the category of TX-FTOs, adding them to an existing law authorizing civil lawsuits against criminal street gangs. While federal law provides a centralized administrative scheme for designating FTOs, the TX-FTO category under the Texas penal code is considerably looser, defined simply as “three or more persons operating as an organization at least partially outside the United States who engage in criminal activity and threaten the security of this state or its residents, including but not limited to a drug cartel.”

The Texas statute, as amended by S.B. 1900, authorizes state and local officials as well as private residents to bring civil suits against TX-FTOs—without needing to show any “personal injury.” Defendants can be members of these organizations engaging in “gang activity” and “[a]ny person who owns or is responsible for maintaining a place that is habitually used for engaging in gang activity.” Violations of court orders obtained against such groups can result in fines or jail time for individuals and money damages or the seizure of property.

Despite these serious consequences, the applicable definitions at least require a connection to allegations of criminal activity. Only a TX-FTO engaged in a public nuisance that regularly “associates in gang activities” can be held liable, and gang activity is defined as organized criminal activity, terroristic threats, and other conduct, including “soliciting membership in a … foreign terrorist organization” that requires the commission of a crime as a condition for membership.

The Texas proclamation’s additional designation of CAIR as a transnational criminal organization comes from S.B. 17, a law the Governor signed in June 2025 that mostly received attention for banning land sales to individuals domiciled in countries such as China and Iran. But S.B. 17 amended Texas Property Code Section 5.254 to ban the purchase or acquisition of interests in land by a “company or organization” that is designated as a TCO by the Governor. As a ban on land ownership by U.S. entities, the TCO provision does not have a direct analogue in federal anti-terrorism law.

Under the amended Texas Property Code, the Governor, after consulting with the state’s public safety director, may designate a “country or a transnational criminal organization” after determining that “the purchase or acquisition of an interest in real property in this state by an individual or entity poses a risk to the national security of the public.” A TCO is defined as “two or more persons” who are: 1) “citizens of or domiciled in a designated country”; 2) “with an identifiable leadership who operate internationally,” and 3) “who continuously or regularly associate to engage in corruption, violence, or the commission of other criminal activities.” Unlike the Texas FTO laws, the TCO framework does not even purport to be grounded in substantive criminal law definitions.

Meanwhile, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ executive order has three operative provisions. First, it designates as “terrorist organizations for the purpose of this Executive Order” the Muslim Brotherhood and its chapters, CAIR, and any other federally designated FTO. Notably, this part of the order does not designate these groups as foreign terrorist organizations, which are already defined under Florida law as the same groups designated by the federal government. (Florida law already makes it a crime to provide material support to federally designated terrorist groups or to use military-type training acquired from such organizations, largely mirroring federal criminal law).

Instead, referencing a separate provision of Florida law, the new executive order describes a terrorist organization as “any organized group engaged in or organized for the purpose of engaging in activity involving a violent act or an act dangerous to human life and is intended to intimidate, injure, or coerce a civilian population; influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or affect the conduct of government through destruction of property, assassination, murder, kidnapping, or aircraft piracy.”

Using this definition untethered to federal designations, the executive order directs the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and Highway Patrol to “undertake all lawful measures to prevent unlawful activities” by the groups Governor De Santis has newly designated. Most significantly, it requires all other executive agencies to prevent these groups, as well as “any person known to have provided material support or resources to such organization,” from “receiving any contract, employment, funds, or other benefit or privilege” from any state executive agency, any entity regulated by such agency, or any county or municipality in the state.

Thus, on its face, this prohibition on state contracts and employment would appear to reach all of CAIR’s donors, employees, and anyone else who has provided funds, services, training, expert assistance or any other “material support or resources” to CAIR. While federal law forbids material support to FTOs, that provision requires going through the procedural steps of the criminal process. The DeSantis order instead purports to empower state agencies to make administrative determinations depriving people of employment and other benefits.

What’s New and Dangerous in These Orders

The Texas and Florida orders emulate—and in some respects, surpass—the worst features of the federal terrorism designation scheme. First, courts have long skirted First Amendment freedom of association concerns with the federal terrorism designation scheme through a purported focus on international terrorism, framed as a matter of primarily foreign relations law where constitutional protections should be read narrowly in favor of deference to the executive branch. That is why there has never been a legal schema to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations. In the second Trump era, this firewall is being actively dismantled, with the Texas and Florida attacks on CAIR and Trump’s attempt to declare domestic groups as terrorist organizations under National Security Presidential Memorandum-7.

Second, while federal terrorism designations are unilateral executive actions, they are at least shaped by administrative agencies. To be sure, federal intelligence agencies’ claims to expertise have long been problematic, especially when asserted as a reason for courts to defer to terrorism designations. But these agencies have at times served as a mild check on the impulses of the presidency – as in resisting efforts to designate the Muslim Brotherhood during the first Trump administration. States that are now declaring civil rights groups to be terrorists cannot claim even the traditional reasons invoked for federal expertise, such as the staffing and processes for making such determinations or equivalent access to classified intelligence; it’s unvarnished politics all the way through.

States that had previously enacted criminal bans on material support to foreign terrorist organizations, including Florida, had generally piggybacked on the federal government’s determinations of which groups qualified. Those earlier state laws were troubling in themselves: they gave state prosecutors the power to charge people based on an already overbroad concept of material support. (The International Center for Nonprofit Law concluded in 2024 that existing state terrorism laws had “far broader, vaguer, and more draconian provisions than commonly understood.”) But the new orders take a significant step further still in declaring domestic groups terrorist organizations.

Moreover, red states governors are now squarely expanding the targeting of property interests, whether land ownership in Texas or access to state benefits and contracts in Florida. In the post-9/11 global war on terror, the federal government blocked the assets of several U.S. citizens and U.S. charities by labeling them specially designated global terrorists, a category that stripped them of bank accounts and the ability to engage in any economic transactions. These measures technically made it illegal for a designated person to buy a cup of coffee. Nonetheless, the federal government seemed to recognize the steep legal and political consequences of targeting U.S. persons. It placed only a handful of U.S. persons on these lists over two decades, and it seemed reluctant to force judges to rule on the contours of its powers to seize U.S. persons’ property. When Muhammad Salah, one of the very few U.S. citizens to be placed on a terrorism sanctions list while still in the country, challenged these measures, the government quickly mooted the case by removing the designation.

While the federal government leaned into its primary authority over international matters as a way to extract deference from courts in the global war on terror, today’s red state governors may attempt to use core areas of state government such as land regulation, government contracting, and welfare benefits instead.

Legal Challenges to State Designations

The Texas and Florida orders are legally vulnerable on several grounds, which we only begin to describe here. First, in purporting to sanction organizations as foreign terrorist or transnational criminal organizations, these laws are likely preempted under the Supreme Court’s 9-0 decision in Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council, which invalidated a Massachusetts law barring state agencies from buying goods from companies engaged in business with Burma. The Court found the Massachusetts law a violation of the Supremacy Clause because it threatened to frustrate federal statutory objectives. Even if it shared the same goals as federal sanctions on Burma, the Court found the state law to interfere with “calibrated” federal sanctions by penalizing different groups and with different means. Defining groups as foreign terrorist organizations distinct from those designated at the federal level trenches on federal authority.

While states do have traditional police power over crime and public safety, their efforts to target entirely domestic civil society groups raise additional First Amendment and due process concerns. In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the 2010 Supreme Court decision sustaining the federal criminal ban on material support to designated FTOs, the Court took care to distinguish between First Amendment rights applicable to support for foreign and domestic groups. When states designate domestic groups—and then further preclude state contracts or employment to anyone providing “material support” to such groups—they squarely raise the freedom of speech and association questions the Court pointedly distinguished from the foreign material support statute. Although the Texas and Florida orders are not criminal prohibitions, they significantly threaten the liberty and property rights of U.S. civil society groups and citizen supporters. As U.S. organizations, groups like CAIR have indisputable due process rights to notice and a hearing, which these executive orders failed to grant them.

In addressing these legal issues, courts should not accord state terrorist designations any of the deference they sometimes accord to federal national security determinations. States have neither the constitutional authority nor expertise to make national security decisions, so the traditional reasons offered for deference—exaggerated as they are even in the federal context—simply do not apply. Likely aware of the legal problems, the state of Texas has already tried to walk back part of Abbott’s order, insisting that it does not even affect the local chapters of CAIR (and therefore that they lack standing to contest it).

Laboratories of Authoritarianism

The flagrant legal infirmities of these orders and the possibility of their being at least partially invalidated by courts is hardly reason for complacency. The laws may chill people from associating with designated groups even when they have every right to do so, as well as embroil the organizations in costly legal battles that divert attention from their core work. Indeed, these measures are almost certainly designed to generate these effects.

Aping federal terrorism law also serves as a means for right-wing state governments to inspire federal action. Trump’s early 2025 designation of drug cartels as FTOs—which set the tone for both his ramped-up deportation policies and his military campaign against Venezuela—was prefigured by a 2022 Texas executive order labeling several Mexican drug cartels as TX-FTOs. And on January 13, 2026, just weeks after the Florida and Texas orders, the Trump administration promulgated terrorism designations of the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Lebanese affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood, fulfilling a long-standing goal of anti-Muslim groups, authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, and some supporters of Israel. While CAIR is not explicitly targeted in these efforts, the designation of these Muslim Brotherhood chapters—some of which are mass membership organizations—radically expands the scope of U.S. persons who can potentially be punished and surveilled for allegedly supporting them.

Rather than wait for more red states to attempt similar antics, civil society and legal groups should push back against these efforts now, both in Texas and Florida and in other states that might follow suit. New bills introduced in other states already seek to expand state designations, while other states may leverage previously unused but overbroad definitions of terrorist organizations under existing law. The domestic targeting of dissent starts with groups that those in power deem to be attractive political targets, but it never ends there. Without further opposition to these orders, CAIR is likely only the first of many groups to be in the crosshairs of politically motivated governors.