Texas brands Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR as terrorist groups

Houston: The governor of Texas on Tuesday blacklisted two Muslim groups as terrorist organizations, including CAIR, one of the most prominent Islamic civil rights organizations in the United States.

Greg Abbott, the Republican governor, also blacklisted the Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide Islamist organization.

“Today, I designated the Muslim Brotherhood and Council on American-Islamic Relations as foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organizations,” Abbott announced in a post on X.

The designation bans them from buying or acquiring land in Texas and authorizes the state to sue to shut them down, Abbott said.

Texas is among US states with a fast-growing Muslim population — some 313,000 people as of 2025, according to statistics from World Population review.

Washington-based CAIR, which has 30 offices across the country, has been advocating for civil rights for Muslims in the United States since the mid-1990s and has been a vocal critic of the US government’s policy in the Gaza conflict.

It condemned Tuesday’s announcement, saying Abbot had “spent months stoking anti-Muslim hysteria to smear American Muslims critical of the Israeli government.”

Abbott has made his support for the Jewish state in the Gaza conflict clear, and has labeled pro-Palestinian student demonstrations that have occurred within state lines as antisemitic.

The designation of entities as terrorist organizations is usually a prerogative of the federal government, not of individual states.

However, as early as September 2024, Abbott designated the criminal gang Tren de Aragua as an international terrorist organization. His ally US President Donald Trump did the same at the federal level in February 2025.

In September, Abbott enacted a Texas state law that prohibits real estate projects from becoming exclusive complexes operating under “Sharia law” or Islamic law.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been targeting a real estate project in Plano, a city north of Dallas, for months, accusing it of being linked to irregularities.

The project’s managers have denied that the complex is intended to be exclusively for Muslims and assert that it complies with the country’s laws.