Muslim civil rights group sues over Texas governor's terrorist group designation

(CN) — The Council on American–Islamic Relations on Thursday challenged a proclamation by Texas Governor Greg Abbott designating the Muslim civil rights group as a foreign terrorist organization and a transnational criminal organization.

Abbott’s Tuesday proclamation declares that CAIR is a “successor organization” to the Muslim Brotherhood — a transnational Islamist organization founded in Egypt in 1928 — and a “front group” for Hamas that seeks to “advance Sharia law in America."

In a social media post, Abbott said the proclamation bans CAIR from purchasing or acquiring land in Texas and authorizes the state’s attorney general to “sue to shut them down.”

CAIR rejected the proclamation’s claims in the complaint filed Thursday in the Western District of Texas. CAIR’s Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin chapters say the proclamation violates the First Amendment, claiming Abbott is targeting the group for its political advocacy.

CAIR also argues the proclamation violates its due process rights and that only the U.S. Secretary of State has the exclusive authority to designate foreign terrorist organizations. The lawsuit lists Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton as defendants.

“Governor Abbott improperly invoked the power of his office to designate plaintiffs as ‘foreign terrorist organizations’ and ’transnational criminal organizations’ without due process and in violation of federal law,” CAIR says in its complaint. “He thus empowered Attorney General Paxton to pursue actions to deprive plaintiffs and their members of their constitutionally protected property rights in the state of Texas, creating an imminent risk of harm. This attempt to punish the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization simply because Governor Abbott disagrees with its views is not only contrary to the United States Constitution, but finds no support in any Texas law.”

Abbott and Paxton’s offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

“The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world,’" Abbott said in a statement announcing the proclamation. “The actions taken by the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR to support terrorism across the globe and subvert our laws through violence, intimidation, and harassment are unacceptable.”

In a post on X Tuesday, Abbott responded to CAIR announcing that it would sue over the proclamation: “That’s great. The lawsuits will open the doors to all of their financial transactions and funding. To all of their dealings and misdeeds. The Attorney General will have a heyday.”

This isn’t the first time CAIR has been involved in a legal dispute with the Texas government. The group’s Legal Defense Fund previously challenged an executive order by Abbott directing public universities to punish pro-Palestinian student groups for “antisemitic” speech and a Texas law requiring companies to promise not to boycott Israel in order to obtain state contracts.

“CAIR Legal Defense Fund has successfully sued and defeated Texas Governor Greg Abbott the last three times he tried to violate the First Amendment by punishing critics of the Israeli government," Lena Masri, CAIR’s litigation director and general counsel, said in a statement Thursday announcing CAIR’s lawsuit challenging Abbott’s proclamation.

“The lawsuit we have filed today is our first step towards defeating Governor Abbott again so that our nation protects free speech and due process for all Americans. No civil rights organizations are safe if a governor can baselessly and unilaterally declare any of them terrorist groups, ban them from buying land, and threaten them with closure. We have beaten Greg Abbott’s attacks on the First Amendment before, and God willing, we will do it again now,” she added.