Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed an executive order designating one of the country’s most prominent Muslim civil rights groups, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, as a “foreign terrorist organization,” becoming the second high-profile Republican governor to do so in recent weeks.
CAIR’s Florida chapter announced a lawsuit challenging the order at a Tuesday press conference in Tampa, where Hiba Rahim, the chapter’s interim executive director, called the order “defamatory and unconstitutional.”
The U.S. government has not designated CAIR or the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations, but President Donald Trump last month began the process of doing so for certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters, such as those in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan.
The Florida order instructs agencies to take action to prevent CAIR from receiving any state contracts, employment or funding.
CAIR was founded in 1994 and has chapters in nearly two dozen U.S. states.

