The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has been operating with impunity in the United States since its founding in 1994.
Nihad Awad, Omar Ahmad, and Rafeeq Jaber established the organization. Its headquarters are located in Washington, D.C., and it has since grown to become the largest Muslim "civil liberties" and Muslim advocacy organization in the United States.
CAIR is frequently criticized for ignorance of what American civil liberties are. Critics argue that CAIR's advocacy for Palestinian rights or its criticism of specific anti-Islamophobia measures runs counter to conventional understandings of liberty and security. Its notion of First Amendment free speech protections is laughable.
In 2001, CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the infamous Holy Land Foundation trial, where it was shown that entities connected to CAIR were funneling money to Hamas and Palestinian terrorists.
Last week, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced a bill to designate CAIR as a terrorist organization.
The bill is called “The Designating Hamas Affiliates in America Act of 2026." The bill "directs the Secretary of the Treasury to designate CAIR as a terrorist entity, blocking its assets, revoking its tax-exempt status, and banning U.S. persons from engaging in any transactions with it," according to the Middle East Forum (MEF). "If passed, the legislation would effectively force CAIR to cease operations and dissolve for being one of Hamas’s most prolific advocates in the Western world."
The bill’s findings meticulously chronicle CAIR’s history of extremism, delivering a comprehensive and legally grounded account of the nonprofit’s links to global terrorism. It documents CAIR’s establishment as a public relations front for Hamas and its status as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial (2007–2008), in which founding board member of CAIR’s Texas chapter, Ghassan Elashi, was sentenced to 65 years in prison for funneling over $12 million to Hamas.
CAIR's radicalism was even too much for Joe Biden.
Roy’s legislation also documents U.S. government actions to isolate and suspend law enforcement contact with CAIR. In 2023, the Biden administration publicly disavowed the organization after CAIR founder and executive director Nihad Awad declared that he was “happy to see” Palestinians “breaking the siege” on October 7 in Israel and referred to Gaza as a “concentration camp.”
This isn't the first attempt by the government to designate CAIR as a terrorist organization. Texas and Florida's efforts in this regard are facing legal challenges. And other congressional attempts to designate CAIR a terrorist group tried to use the Foreign Terrorist Organization statute, which involves overseas groups involved in violent acts.
Benjamin Baird, director of MEF Action, said in a press release, “With the introduction of this bill, we finally have a realistic pathway to designating CAIR as a terrorist group. This legislation builds directly on years of documented evidence and shifts from symbolic gestures to enforceable action that can finally dismantle CAIR’s operations in America.”
“After three decades of exposing CAIR’s deep ties to Hamas and its campaign of deception, this bill marks the decisive moment we’ve been fighting for,” said the executive director of the Middle East Forum, Gregg Roman.
“Congress now has the tools to strip away CAIR’s legitimacy, revoke its taxpayer-funded privileges, and finally dismantle one of the most effective Islamist influence operations in America.”
If passed, this bill is headed to the Supreme Court. While CAIR supports Hamas elliptically, there may be enough plausible deniability to give it legal cover. Employing pro-Hamas rhetoric is protected speech, as long as CAIR makes no explicit calls for violence.
Implementation of the bill would be seen as disenfranchising Muslims. That's not the case, but that's how CAIR and its media allies would portray it. Until American Muslims disown CAIR and its rancid ideology, CAIR will likely be around to spout its hate for quite a while.
