US terror designation of Muslim Brotherhood and Cair 'in the works'

Similar calls have come from several US lawmakers in the past, but now a cabinet-level official is making the assertion

Microphones from various media outlets are set up for a press conference by the Council on American-Islamic Relations in an undated photo (Cair/Facebook)

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In comments on a right-wing radio show earlier this week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Trump administration is working on designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation, as well as cracking down on a Muslim-American non-profit for its perceived ties to the Brotherhood.

While calls to do so have come from several US lawmakers in the past, they have not borne fruit. But now, a cabinet-level official is making the assertion.

"Why wouldn’t you guys designate the Muslim Brotherhood and Cair?" asked the radio host, Sid Rosenberg, referencing the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil liberties organisation in the country.

"I just - I look at these organisations. I have a mayor’s race here in New York City with this psycho, this lunatic Mamdani," he added, referencing the current Democratic candidate for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who also happens to be Muslim.

"Both of these groups, you know, are behind him, especially the Muslim Brotherhood," Rosenberg said of Cair's indirect financial support for the progressive candidate. "Is that something you think we can count on maybe in the near future? Maybe not Cair just yet, but certainly the Muslim Brotherhood?"

"Yeah, all of that is in the works," Rubio responded.

"Obviously, there are different branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, so you’d have to designate each one of them... these things are going to be challenged in court, right?"

"We are constantly reviewing for groups to designate for what they are: supporters of terrorists, maybe terrorists themselves, whatever it may be. We haven’t done this in a long time, so it’s - we’ve got a lot of catch-up to do. And you’ve mentioned a couple names, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, that are of grave concern," he said.

Last month, a bill was introduced in the House of Representatives called the "Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2025", which called on the Trump administration to do just that.

And a letter was sent just last week by Republican Senator Tom Cotton, calling on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to revoke Cair's nonprofit status for its alleged "ties to terrorist activities" linked to "Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood".

US senator asks tax authority to strip Muslim civil rights organisation of nonprofit status

Middle East Eye reached out to Cair for a response on Rubio's comments, and was referred to a statement released by the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (Mpac) instead, which condemned the move to "smear" a domestic group "or treat political disagreement as grounds for terrorism designation".

Mpac's vice president of policy and programming, Haris Tarin, is a former senior policy advisor to the Secretary of Homeland Security, and was at the agency under three different presidents since the Obama administration.

"For the Secretary of State to comment on Cair... that's extremely problematic and concerning to us. He does not have the right to say that. He does not have the authority. He does not have the mandate," Tarin told MEE.

"The conversation around Cair [now]... that was never in previous administrations, including Biden, Trump 1.0, Obama, and Bush," he added. "There was never conversations about banning Cair. There was conversations about engaging Cair and whether the federal government thought it was a politically right or politically savvy thing for them to engage Cair".

The public, Tarin said, should be "extremely alarmed when it comes to designating a domestic institution" precisely because Americans fund it and it is not a foreign institution.

What could happen - should the Trump administration compile clear evidence for such a case - is that it would have to file charges through the Department of Justice, he explained.

What is The Muslim Brotherhood?

The Muslim Brotherhood is most commonly known in the Arab world as a political party founded on Islamic principles and laws, whose support skyrocketed in the wake of the 2011 Arab protests aimed at overthrowing autocratic rulers.

It was established in the late 1920s in Egypt and gained popularity as the mid-century ushered in secular governments that saw modernisation and westernisation interchangeably.

In 2012, after the toppling of Egypt's ruler of three decades, Hosni Mubarak, an internationally-monitored election in Egypt saw the victory of its first Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohammed Morsi.

Within a year, he was toppled by the military, imprisoned, and died in prison in 2019. The Muslim Brotherhood is now banned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, and most recently in Jordan.

'Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiments have created a narrative in the US where democracy is good, except when religious Muslims win to govern their own countries'

- Raed Jarrar, Dawn

"Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiments have created a narrative in the US where democracy is good, except when religious Muslims win to govern their own countries," Raed Jarrar, the advocacy director for Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn), told MEE.

"We saw that narrative come out of Gaza when Hamas won the elections. We saw that narrative come out of Egypt when the Muslim Brotherhood won the elections. We saw that narrative in Tunisia, in Libya, in Jordan, and many other countries where religious Muslims won democratic elections," he said.

Jarrar added that there is no singular Brotherhood entity or "headquarters" because it's an ideology and a movement that springs up independently across each of the countries in the Middle East and North Africa - so a US designation would have to be detailed and country-specific to hold up in court, just as Rubio indicated.

For lawmakers pushing for a terror designation, the Muslim Brotherhood "poses a direct threat to US national security through radical jihadist attempts to eliminate and destroy America and its allies", Florida Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, who sponsored the House bill, said in a press release.

MEE put the question to George Washington University professor Nathan Brown, who is an expert on Middle East politics and sits on the board of trustees at the American University in Cairo.

In what ways is the Muslim Brotherhood a threat to US national security?

"None at all," he said.

Anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian sentiment

When Senator Cotton wrote to the IRS, he alleged that Cair was listed as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee and that the group participated in a meeting of Hamas supporters in Philadelphia.

Cair firmly rejected the claims and said they're tied to anti-Muslim bigotry.

"You have some very heated anti-Muslim forces [in the State Department] that are a little bit more eager to try to find and make those connections, but they're going to run into the same problem: you can't. There's no smoking gun anywhere, because there's no real, tangible connection," Shahed Amanullah, a former State Department senior staffer under Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, told MEE.

What’s so scary about the Muslim Brotherhood?

The State Department is the agency that is responsible for any terrorist designations, as well as visa revocations.

"In the past, I would say that people at the State Department were sophisticated and smart enough to understand the nuances of those affiliated movements overseas, and that it wasn't some kind of command and control structure," Amanullah said of the Muslim Brotherhood.

"Those people have been hollowed out from the State Department," he said.

Unlike past attempts at designating the Brotherhood and going after Cair, this time in particular, it's also taking place with the backdrop of the genocide in Gaza, Tarin told MEE.

"Anything that has to do with American-Muslim institutions... it has to do with their support for pro-Palestinian organisations," he said.

The Trump administration has made it a priority to go after international students and some of the most prestigious universities in the country for pro-Palestine protests and activism. Students have been jailed in immigration detention centres, deported, and the institutions they attended were effectively sued for hundreds of millions of dollars by the government.

Jewish Voice for Peace, which has joined pro-Palestine demonstrations, has previously noted that the administration's playbook is taken from the Heritage Foundation's “Project Esther” report, "which is a blueprint for using the federal government and private institutions to dismantle the Palestine solidarity movement and broader US civil society, under the guise of 'fighting antisemitism'".

"I think pro-Israel groups feel that American Muslim institutions that support the pro-Palestinian movement are a threat to their existence here in the US, and their dominance of US foreign policy," Tarin told MEE.

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