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The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is now shuttered in Florida after the state’s designation of it as a domestic terrorist organization began.
The indefinite public retreat from operations followed a ruling by Chief U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor of the Northern District of Florida, who declined Wednesday to temporarily block the designation while CAIR mounts challenges in federal court.
“We have suspended our operations in Florida because of Gov. DeSantis and other state officials’ baseless and unconstitutional enforcement of the state’s unprecedented new ‘domestic terrorist organization’ laws against us,” CAIR-Florida announced on its website, displaying the statement against a black background.
The cessation of CAIR operations was confirmed by Attorney-General James Uthmeier who called the ruling a “great win by our Solicitor General’s office and for the people of Florida.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Cabinet officially labeled CAIR as a domestic terrorist organization on September 29 but the designation only went into effect Thursday.
“Florida officials have been relentless in seeking to silence our clients’ civil rights work and advocacy, damaging not only them but also their community,” said Ashley Gorski, senior counsel for the ACLU National Security Project, who represented the group in court, per FOX News 13.
CAIR argued the label violates their rights under the First Amendment and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Laurie Jaghlit, manager of Share the Quran Project of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), stacks translated copies of the Quran on a table prior to a news conference at CAIR’s headquarters on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The organization was one of 90 groups labeled domestic or international terrorist organizations by the DeSantis-led Cabinet.
Others include the Muslim Brotherhood, the Venezuelan crime syndicate Tren de Aragua, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, and the anti-fascism movement known as antifa.
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