A Muslim American group has sued Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for designating it a “foreign terrorist organisation”, accusing the right-wing politician of violating its free speech rights over its Palestine advocacy.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its Florida chapter filed the lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday to revoke the state decree that blacklisted the organisation.
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“The Executive Order [EO] identifies no criminal charges or convictions, relies on no federal designation, and inaccurately invokes statutory authority,” the lawsuit said.
“It rests on political rhetoric and imposes sweeping legal consequences on a domestic civil rights organisation because of its viewpoints and advocacy.”
DeSantis issued the order last week, labelling the group a “terror” organisation along with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The lawsuit was filed amid a spike in Islamophobia and right-wing calls for targeting Muslim groups in the United States, a push that CAIR said aims to suppress speech in support of Palestinian human rights.
Tuesday’s lawsuit noted that CAIR has helped legally challenge DeSantis’s ban against Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
“CAIR’s advocacy on Palestine-related issues, including its representation of SJP chapters and opposition to state censorship of pro-Palestinian speech, forms an important part of the factual context in which Defendant DeSantis issued the EO,” it said.
CAIR decries lack of due process
Last week, DeSantis said he would “welcome” legal action by CAIR, saying it would give the state “discovery rights to be able to subpoena” the group’s bank records.
CAIR’s lawyers cited that response in the lawsuit, arguing that it demonstrates the governor’s pre-existing bias against the group.
“These contemporaneous statements confirm that the Executive Order was intended to burden and deter Plaintiffs’ advocacy rather than to serve any legitimate state interest,” it read.
The lawsuit also underscored that only the US secretary of state has the authority to designate a group a “foreign terrorist organisation”, saying DeSantis’s order is “preempted” by federal law.
It also noted the lack of avenues for CAIR to confront or review the designation. “The Executive Order is self-executing, indefinite, and issued without procedural safeguards,” it said.
CAIR deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said the group is hopeful that the lawsuit will succeed because DeSantis’s move is “blatantly unconstitutional”.
“If you want to punish an organisation for wrongdoing, you find evidence they did something wrong, you present that evidence in a court of law, due process occurs, and then a judge decides what the consequences are,” Mitchell told Al Jazeera.
“Governor DeSantis has skipped over that entire process because he knows care has not done anything wrong.”
Mitchell went on to say that DeSantis should reflect on his own faults.
“It is he who has done something wrong,” he said.
“Ron DeSantis needs to account for his ‘Israel first’ policies, his attacks on the First Amendment and his support for the genocide in Gaza. He is the one who needs to answer for his conduct, not CAIR.”
Texas crackdown
DeSantis’s designation followed a similar decree by another Republican governor, Greg Abbott of Texas, which CAIR is also challenging in court.
On Tuesday, Senator John Cornyn, who represents Texas, said he would push to revoke CAIR’s tax-exempt status, invoking baseless allegations that the group is pushing to impose Islamic law in the country.
“CAIR is a radical group of terrorist sympathisers with a long history of undermining American values and trying to unconstitutionally impose sharia law on Texas,” Cornyn told Fox News.
Islamic law has no legal standing in federal or state courts anywhere in the US.
But right-wing advocates have drummed up unfounded fear of it for years as they push to demonise the Muslim community.
Over the past two decades, state and federal lawmakers have pushed to pass measures against Islamic law that critics said are unnecessary and only serve to fuel bigotry against Muslims.
CAIR’s Mitchell dismissed Cornyn’s threats, stressing that CAIR is a law-abiding group and there is no legal basis to target its tax status.
“If John Cornyn really thinks that American Muslims, who make up one percent of the American population, are trying to – or are somehow on the verge of – imposing Islamic law on 350 million people, he’s insane,” Mitchell said.
