On April 6, Governor Ron DeSantis signed Florida House Bill 1471. The bill gives the governor and cabinet the authority to designate organizations as "domestic terrorists," dissolve them by executive action, seize their assets, and charge anyone who provides "material support" with a felony carrying up to thirty years in prison.
The bill text does not define, with any specificity, what conduct justifies designation. It does not require a finding of criminal activity, a showing of imminent harm, a grand jury, or a judicial warrant. It does not provide for a pre-designation hearing. It does not provide for standing to challenge the designation in state court before assets are seized. A criminal defendant charged with "material support" can raise the designation as a defense at trial — but by then, the organization has already been dissolved, its bank accounts frozen, and its employees scattered.
Florida has now enacted, at the state level, a faster and less-regulated version of the federal Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) authority that the U.S. Treasury has operated under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act since 1977. The federal version at least requires a documented connection to a foreign threat. The Florida version does not.
What the Bill Does
HB 1471 cleared the Florida legislature in late March and reached DeSantis's desk with minimal public debate. Florida Phoenix reported the signing on April 6. WUSF confirmed the effective date and summarized the key provisions.
The bill creates three distinct powers.
First, the governor, acting with the cabinet, may issue a written designation that a named organization is a "domestic terrorist organization." The designation takes effect immediately on publication in the Florida Administrative Register. No prior notice to the organization is required.
Second, upon designation, Florida financial institutions must freeze any account held by the organization. Florida-domiciled assets — including real property, vehicles, and contracted services — become subject to civil forfeiture. The Florida Division of Corporations is required to dissolve any Florida-incorporated entity carrying the designation.
Third, the bill creates a new felony: providing "material support or resources" to a designated organization. The definition of "material support" borrows from the federal 18 U.S.C. § 2339B — financial contributions, services, expert advice or assistance, training, and personnel. Conviction carries a sentence of up to thirty years.
Challenges to a designation must be brought in the Florida Second District Court of Appeal. The burden of proof is on the challenger. The standard of review is "clear and convincing evidence" that the designation was "arbitrary, capricious, or unsupported by substantial evidence." That is the same deferential standard applied to most agency decisions — which means, in practice, a reviewing court will almost always affirm.
What Federal Courts Have Said About State Designation Power
HB 1471 is not the first attempt by a Florida governor to exercise this authority. In early 2025, DeSantis issued an executive order purporting to designate the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) a "foreign terrorist organization" under state law. The Southern District of Florida blocked the order within weeks.
In CAIR-Florida v. DeSantis, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction on the grounds that the executive order violated the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment's due process guarantees. Walker held that the order functioned as a bill of attainder — a legislative act inflicting punishment on a named party without trial — and that the designation procedure lacked the minimum procedural protections the Constitution requires before the government may brand an advocacy organization as a criminal enterprise. The injunction remains in effect.
HB 1471 is the Florida legislature's attempt to route around Walker's ruling by converting the executive-order mechanism into a statutory one. The theory is that a general statute authorizing gubernatorial designation, rather than a one-off executive order targeting a specific organization, cures the bill-of-attainder problem. That theory is untested in federal court. It is also contested: the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida argued in an April 7 statement that a statute delegating unlimited designation power to the governor, without an identifiable legal standard, is no less a bill of attainder than an executive order using the same power against a named target.
CAIR-Florida stated on April 7 that the organization is preparing a constitutional challenge. The filing is expected within two weeks, according to reporting by Salon published on April 17.
The Salon Frame: "National Security Power Grab"
The Salon April 17 piece is worth reading for a reason beyond its reporting. The framing is explicitly libertarian and cross-partisan. The headline — "DeSantis' national security power grab" — rejects the state's preferred framing of HB 1471 as a response to campus protests or foreign influence and reanchors the story as a separation-of-powers problem.
The core argument in the Salon piece, which tracks with the ACLU statement, is that HB 1471 folds together three governmental functions the Constitution deliberately separates. The legislature normally writes the criminal law. The executive normally enforces it. The judiciary normally adjudicates individual cases. HB 1471 lets the executive write the criminal law (by designating), enforce it (by freezing and forfeiting), and — because pre-designation review is unavailable — effectively adjudicate it. A named target cannot go to court before the designation is in effect. By the time a court weighs in, the organization's bank accounts are frozen and its corporate charter dissolved.
This is the structural objection. It applies regardless of which organization the governor designates. It would apply equally to a designation targeting a left-wing climate-protest organization, a right-wing militia, an abortion-rights advocacy group, a church-affiliated refugee resettlement agency, or a civic organization aligned with any political constituency in Florida.
That is why the objection is constitutional rather than partisan. A designation power that exists at all will eventually be used against the political opposition of whoever holds it. The Ninth Circuit recognized this in ACLU v. City of Las Vegas (1998), striking down a statute granting municipal officials discretion to prohibit "disruptive" assemblies without identifiable standards: "Unfettered discretion in the hands of government officials is the historical precondition of selective enforcement."
Why This Is a Preview
HB 1471 is not an isolated state action. Five other states — Georgia, Missouri, Texas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma — have introduced or advanced similar designation bills in 2025 and 2026. Georgia HB 1379, which passed both chambers in March 2026, sits on Governor Brian Kemp's desk awaiting signature. Missouri SB 847 cleared committee in the Senate in February. Oklahoma HB 3251 passed the House in early April. Texas HB 4251 is in committee after a hearing in late March.
The state designation wave is a structural response to the difficulty of achieving federal designation through the existing statutory process. Federal SDGT designation under Executive Order 13224 requires a finding by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State, that an entity has committed, or poses a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism that threaten U.S. national security. The Foreign Terrorist Organization designation under 8 U.S.C. § 1189 requires a similar threshold plus an administrative record reviewable in the D.C. Circuit.
These federal standards are imperfect, but they are standards. Organizations have been removed from the FTO list (the Mujahedin-e Khalq in 2012, for example) after sustained legal and evidentiary challenges. The state designation statutes now being enacted do not replicate these safeguards. They substitute executive discretion for the statutory findings federal law requires.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression warned in a February 2026 analysis that the state-level designation wave poses a threat to advocacy organizations across the political spectrum. FIRE's position, consistent with its long-standing free-speech posture, is that any statute authorizing the executive to brand a civic organization as a terrorist group without trial is constitutionally infirm — irrespective of the target.
The Sharia-Free America Caucus Connection
There is a legislative pattern connecting the state designation wave to federal legislation under the Sharia-Free America Caucus banner. The caucus, co-chaired by Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Keith Self (R-TX), has introduced seven bills in the current Congress. One of those bills — Roy's "Designating Hamas Affiliates in America Act of 2026," introduced April 9 — would use the existing federal SDGT mechanism to designate the Council on American–Islamic Relations. Unlike HB 1471, the Roy bill is constrained by the federal statutory framework. It would still require an Executive Order 13224 determination. It would still be subject to judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act.
Florida's state-level path removes those constraints.
The coordination, such as it is, runs through think-tank-to-legislator pipelines documented in recent reporting. The Middle East Forum's February 2026 "Islamism in Texas" report and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' March 23, 2026 piece on K-12 foreign funding are two recent think-tank products that have migrated from research publication to congressional testimony to state-level legislative action in less than six months. State designation bills are the action-end of that pipeline. They do what Washington has not yet done, at the speed a governor's signature allows.
Why It Matters
A state-level designation power that does not require a criminal indictment, a grand jury, or a trial is a power that will eventually be used against someone else's organization. It may be used against a climate-activist group after a pipeline protest turns confrontational. It may be used against a labor union during a strike. It may be used against a church's refugee resettlement program during a migration crisis. It may be used against a civil-rights organization the administration of the moment finds inconvenient.
The historical pattern of American civil liberties is that novel enforcement tools, once created, do not remain with the administration that built them. The federal wiretapping authorities of the Nixon era became the foundation of FISA. The material-support framework of the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was later extended to financial-sanction programs against entire classes of nonprofit organizations. The 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts became, in the early 2000s, a precedent cited in opinions authorizing extraordinary renditions.
HB 1471 will not stay confined to its original targets. The statute itself does not require that it do so.
The coming CAIR-Florida lawsuit will produce the first federal ruling on the constitutionality of a state-level designation statute of this kind. Walker's 2025 injunction against the earlier executive order is the foundation. Whether that foundation holds up against a general statute, rather than a one-off order, is the question the Southern District of Florida will answer over the next several months.
That case will set a precedent that applies, directly or by analogy, to every state designation statute now moving through a legislature. What happens in Tallahassee this year determines what happens in Austin, Atlanta, Jefferson City, Oklahoma City, and Nashville next year.
The Florida law is not the end of anything. It is the opening move.
VALOR Institute's constitutional analysis of state-level designation statutes and the First Amendment traces the legal architecture that Florida's HB 1471 imports and describes how the federal court ruling against the earlier DeSantis executive order shapes the litigation to come.