On July 1, the first day HB 1471 took effect, Governor Ron DeSantis designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Antifa as terrorist organizations under Florida law.
College students in the Florida College System who "promote" any of these designated terrorist organization now face expulsion from state-sponsored schools.
The law, passed during Florida's 2026 regular session, empowers the state's Chief of Domestic Security — currently Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Mark Glass — to formally designate domestic and foreign terrorist organizations. DeSantis's initial list doesn't stop at the three domestic groups. It includes more than 90 foreign organizations already designated by the federal government, among them the Venezuelan crime syndicate Tren de Aragua, Mexico's Cartel de Sinaloa, Cartel del Golfo, and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The legislation also bars Florida courts from enforcing any provision of a religious or foreign law, with specific emphasis on Islamic Sharia law. That provision alone would have been a five-alarm fire in legacy media a decade ago. Now it's a footnote in a bill that makes CAIR a designated terrorist organization in the third-largest state in the country.
CAIR, for its part, has already been fighting this battle in federal court. In March, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction against an earlier DeSantis executive order, ruling it violated CAIR's rights by targeting those providing the organization with material support. The new law, however, isn't an executive order. It's legislation passed by both chambers of the Florida legislature and signed by the governor. That's a different legal animal, and CAIR's attorneys know it.
CAIR has attempted to positioned itself as simply a Muslim civil rights nonprofit for years. Critics — including the UAE, which designated it as a terrorist organization back in 2014 — have long argued the group functions as something considerably less benign. Gov. DeSantis agreed with the UAE and has been making that case since 2023, when he first severed state ties with the organization after the October 7 attacks on Israel.
The terrorist designation is arguably the most culturally significant. For years, we were told CAIR were simply partisan political groups — a line repeated so often it became its own punchline. Florida's position is now that this particular idea qualifies for a terrorist label, and if you're a student at a state college promoting it, you can find another school.
The left's objections write themselves. "Chilling effect on free speech." "Targeting Muslim Americans." "Criminalizing dissent." Those arguments assume the designations are arbitrary. The state's counter is that the designation process runs through the FDLE Commissioner, requires documented evidence, and mirrors the federal framework that's been labeling foreign terrorist organizations for decades.
What is different about this designation is that it is the first-of-its-kind state-level action. No other state has built its own terrorist designation framework and started naming domestic organizations on day one. Blue states can barely designate a pothole for repair.
Florida has now created a template. The legal challenges will come — they already have. But the framework exists, the designations are live, and every state legislature in the country just got a blueprint they can copy, modify, or ignore at their own political risk.
The expulsion clause for college students tells you everything about where this is headed. It's not just about labeling organizations. It's about making the label mean something.
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