The Standing Record
A non-partisan record of US democratic norms —Every entry in the archive, ordered by event date. Page 26 of 42, showing December 8, 2025 to January 3, 2026. Pages contain 50 entries each; entries for a given date may continue on the next or previous page.
On January 3, 2026, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Hesler Asaf Garcia Lanza, a 24-year-old Hempstead resident, without a judicial warrant while he was walking to the LIRR Hempstead station. Garcia Lanza held Special Immigrant Juvenile Status and deferred action; he was held for two days before being released.
On January 2, 2026, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon sent Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon a letter demanding records on the state's same-day voter registration and "vouching" system, in which a registered voter can attest to a new voter's residency, citing the 1960 Civil Rights Act and claiming the practice "seems facially inconsistent" with the Help America Vote Act. Minnesota's Office of the Secretary of State refused the demand on January 16, 2026, saying DOJ had identified no legal basis for the request and no evidence the state's practices violate federal law, and offered training materials on the process instead.
On December 31, 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture under Secretary Brooke Rollins issued new terms requiring recipients of USDA grants and contracts -- including Forest Service wildfire-risk-reduction funding, Community Wildfire Defense Grants, and Good Neighbor Authority agreements -- to pledge compliance with unrelated administration policy demands on DEI, "gender ideology," and immigration enforcement. Democratic-led states including Washington, Oregon, Michigan, and Maryland were unable to sign the new agreements, stalling wildfire-prevention work; a 21-state coalition sued and won a preliminary injunction in June 2026, but $15 million in Spokane-area wildfire grants remained undelivered as of early August 2026, when wildfires forced the evacuation of 65,000 residents there.
On December 31, 2025, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and FEMA notified roughly 50 Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery (CORE) employees that their positions would not be renewed as their contracts expired in early January 2026, according to internal emails obtained by CNN. Two sources said the decision came from FEMA's newly elevated acting administrator, Karen Evans, while a DHS spokesperson called the cuts "a routine staff adjustment of 50 staff out of 8,000" -- a characterization multiple sources disputed, saying ousting every worker whose contract expired in a specific window was not routine.
On Dec. 31, 2025, Joint Task Force Southern Spear carried out successive "lethal kinetic strikes" on two vessels U.S. Southern Command alleged were operated by designated terrorist organizations along known narco-trafficking routes, killing five people — three aboard the first vessel and two aboard the second. SOUTHCOM presented no evidence, identified no one, filed no charges, and reported no attempt at interdiction or arrest. These were the 34th and 35th strikes of Operation Southern Spear and are the earliest strikes in this archive's record of the campaign.
On Dec. 31, 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services froze all federal Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) money to every state, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories "effective immediately," saying it would release the funds only after each state supplied unspecified "administrative data." The freeze followed a Dec. 30 announcement by HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O'Neill and was publicly justified by unverified fraud allegations amplified from a Dec. 26 viral video targeting Somali-American-run day cares in Minnesota. Child-care advocates noted that states already run longstanding, annually updated anti-fraud controls and warned that even a month without funding could force thin-margin providers to close, harming families regardless of whether they receive subsidies.
On December 31, 2025, ICE agents entered the emergency department at Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) in Minneapolis, Minnesota without a judicial warrant to arrest a patient who had just arrived for care, and remained at his bedside for approximately 28 hours, according to the advocacy organization Unidos MN and Minnesota state legislators. During that time agents treated the patient as though he were in criminal custody — denying him family visitation and at points shackling him to the bed — and accessed hospital staff-only areas including break rooms and parking lots, before leaving after a Hennepin County commissioner and state legislators confirmed no warrant existed and asked them to go. DHS did not respond to requests for comment.
On Dec. 30, 2025, at the direction of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted "lethal kinetic strikes" on a three-vessel convoy in the eastern Pacific that U.S. Southern Command described as operated by designated terrorist organizations along narco-trafficking routes, killing three people aboard the first boat. Men aboard the other two vessels jumped overboard before follow-on strikes sank the remaining boats; SOUTHCOM said it notified the Coast Guard for search and rescue, but the search began only after a roughly 45-hour delay and was suspended on Jan. 3 with no survivors found. The command identified no organization, made no evidence public, charged no one, and attempted no interdiction or arrest in what it counted as the 31st through 33rd strikes of a campaign that had by then killed at least 110 people.
On December 30, 2025, the Interior Department's Solicitor sent National Links Trust (NLT) a letter terminating its 50-year lease to manage Washington, D.C.'s three public golf courses — East Potomac, Langston, and Rock Creek — citing unmet capital-improvement obligations and roughly $8.8 million in unpaid rent. NLT disputed the stated basis, saying it had fully complied with the lease and invested more than $8.5 million in the courses since 2020. The termination followed Interior leadership privately pitching President Trump on converting East Potomac into a high-end tournament course, and Trump's own longtime architect touring the site and visiting the White House weeks before the letter issued.
On December 30, 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services froze all federal child-care funding to Minnesota, with Deputy Secretary Jim O'Neill announcing the move on X and crediting a viral video by conservative activist Nick Shirley that alleged fraud at Somali-run day-care centers. HHS — which sends roughly $185 million a year in child-care funds to the state, supporting day care for tens of thousands of children from low-income families — simultaneously imposed a new nationwide condition requiring states to submit a justification plus a receipt or photo evidence before receiving Administration for Children and Families payments. The freeze landed amid the administration's Operation Metro Surge ICE deployment targeting Minnesota's Somali community and was expanded the next day into a freeze of child-care funding to all 50 states.
On December 30, 2025, the Loogootee, Indiana City Council passed a new special-events ordinance containing at least two provisions a federal court had already permanently enjoined as unconstitutional, again restricting where PrideFest could be held relative to the city's Public Square fountain. The ordinance came four months after a federal judge ruled the city's prior special-events ordinance violated the First Amendment by singling out the LGBTQ+ festival, and the city adopted it despite that standing injunction. On January 6, 2026, the ACLU of Indiana filed a new lawsuit and a motion for contempt on behalf of the festival's organizers.
On Dec. 29, 2025, at the direction of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon's Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal "kinetic strike" on a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two people. U.S. Southern Command claimed the boat was operated by designated terrorist organizations and engaged in narco-trafficking but provided no evidence to support the claim. It was the 30th known boat strike in the campaign since Sept. 2, bringing the reported death toll to at least 107.
On December 27, 2025, off-duty U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Adam Saracco pushed attorney and immigrant-rights activist Robert Held to the ground at a gas station in Brookfield, Illinois. Held, who is over 60, had followed Saracco's vehicle from an ICE processing facility in Broadview and was filming him when the confrontation occurred.
Between December 27 and 29, 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, joined by agents from the Camarillo and Los Angeles field offices, detained at least 92 people across Santa Maria, Lompoc, San Luis Obispo, Nipomo, Paso Robles and Santa Barbara, California, apprehending people at homes, workplaces, parking lots and shopping areas starting as early as 4 a.m., and in one case taking a man into custody from the San Luis Obispo County Jail lobby upon his release without presenting a warrant. At a January 2, 2026 press conference, Santa Maria City Councilmember Gloria Soto said local advocacy groups had documented roughly 150 detentions since the sweep began, about 87 of them in Santa Maria, and 805 UndocuFund characterized the operation as indiscriminate racial profiling of working-class Latino communities.
On December 26, 2025, the U.S. Coast Guard awarded sole-source, single-offer contracts worth a combined $2.39 billion to Bollinger Shipyards and Rauma Marine Constructions for six Arctic Security Cutters, citing a public-interest exception rather than competing the work. The awards were the first two of an 11-ship, roughly $3.3 billion program that followed President Trump's personal push for a larger icebreaker fleet than the Coast Guard had itself requested; the program's third contract, awarded to Davie Defense on February 10, 2026, is recorded separately.
On December 26, 2025, Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell sent musician Chuck Redd a letter threatening to seek $1 million in damages after Redd canceled his annual Christmas Eve concert in protest of the Trump-appointed board's renaming of the institution to the "Trump-Kennedy Center." The Kennedy Center followed through by suing Redd for breach of contract in March 2026.
On December 26, 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' General Counsel referred Seattle Children's Hospital to the HHS Office of Inspector General for investigation, citing the hospital's provision of gender-affirming care to transgender minors. The referral -- the first enforcement action against a specifically named hospital following HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s December 18, 2025 declaration that such care is unsafe -- could result in the hospital losing federal Medicare and Medicaid funding. A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general has separately sued to block the underlying declaration, arguing HHS lacks authority to redefine medical standards by fiat.
Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. announced a Memorandum of Understanding on December 24, 2025 to accept U.S. third-country deportees in exchange for $7.5 million in aid, after Palau's Congress and Council of Chiefs had twice rejected the same proposal. The Palau Senate sued in February 2026 alleging the president lacked constitutional authority to enter what amounted to a treaty without legislative ratification, but a judge allowed implementation to proceed; the first deportee arrived in May 2026 and left after two weeks.
The United States and the Democratic Republic of the Congo reached a third-country removal agreement via diplomatic notes dated December 24, 2025, not disclosed until the State Department posted it in June 2026. Fifteen people with U.S.-granted humanitarian protections were forcibly transferred to DRC on April 17, 2026, shackled throughout a 27-hour flight and given only 24 hours' notice of their destination; a U.S. judge later found one woman's removal was likely unlawful and ordered her return.
On December 24, 2025, U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California temporarily barred U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from making arrests at immigration courts across its San Francisco Area of Responsibility -- covering Northern and Central California, Hawaii, Guam, and Saipan -- finding the policy authorizing the practice arbitrary and capricious. The order followed an October 2025 court filing documenting at least 75 courthouse arrests in San Francisco and at least 39 in Sacramento since a January 2025 nationwide ICE directive reversed decades of guidance protecting courthouses from civil immigration arrests. Pitts found the arrests deterred immigrants from attending their own hearings, undermining the immigration court system.
On or about December 24, 2025, the CIA carried out a drone strike on a dock on Venezuela's coast that U.S. officials said was used by the gang Tren de Aragua to load drugs onto boats; no one was reported on the dock and no one was killed. It was the first known U.S. attack inside Venezuelan territory, a sharp escalation of the administration's pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro beyond the at-sea "drug boat" strikes. President Trump publicly claimed credit, saying the U.S. had "knocked out" a "big facility" in "the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs."
On December 23, 2025, at 9:59 a.m. — one minute before a federal court order required his release — ICE officers served the Muscatine County Jail with a new arrest warrant for Jorge Gonzalez Ochoa, a 28-year-old Colombian asylum seeker, circumventing a December 22 release order by U.S. District Judge Stephen H. Locher. ICE had not yet prepared the legally required Notice to Appear when it issued the arrest warrant, and Judge Locher later found the agency sent the notice by regular mail to obscure the sequence and "cover its tracks." Gonzalez Ochoa was not released until January 9, 2026 — seventeen days after the original release order.
On December 23, 2025, the State Department announced it would exclude or deport five individuals — including two leaders of Coalition for Independent Technology Research member organizations — under a visa-restriction policy that Secretary of State Marco Rubio first announced in May 2025 to target foreign "censorship" of Americans' speech. Initially framed as aimed at foreign officials, the policy had by then expanded into a broader campaign against noncitizen researchers, fact-checkers, and trust-and-safety workers who study social media platforms and online harms. Rubio said the Department "stands ready and willing to expand" the list if others did not "reverse course."
On Dec. 22, 2025, at the direction of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear carried out a "lethal kinetic strike" on a low-profile semi-submersible vessel transiting international waters in the eastern Pacific, killing one person, U.S. Southern Command announced. SOUTHCOM said the vessel was operated by an unnamed designated terrorist organization along a known narco-trafficking route but released no evidence of drugs aboard or of an imminent threat, and reported no attempt at interdiction or arrest. It was the 29th strike of Operation Southern Spear, which had killed 105 people since early September.
In a pre-dawn operation on Saturday, Dec. 20, 2025, the U.S. Coast Guard seized a Panama-flagged oil tanker named Centuries off Venezuela, the second sanctioned tanker the United States took within roughly ten days, as part of President Trump's declared "total and complete blockade" of sanctioned oil vessels entering or leaving Venezuela. The White House called Centuries a "falsely flagged vessel operating as part of the Venezuelan shadow fleet," while Venezuela condemned the seizure as "a serious act of piracy" and said it would complain to the U.N. Security Council.
The United States and Antigua and Barbuda signed a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding dated December 19, 2025, allowing the U.S. to propose transferring up to 10 "noncriminal refugees" per year to the Caribbean nation. The deal only became public in January 2026, after the U.S. imposed partial visa restrictions on Antigua and Barbuda effective January 1, 2026, prompting accusations from the political opposition that the timing amounted to coercion.
On December 19, 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and its Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services published proposed rules that would bar Medicare and Medicaid funding from hospitals providing gender-affirming care to patients under 18, using hospitals' conditions of participation to put their entire federal reimbursement eligibility at risk. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. issued a declaration asserting a federal standard of care for transgender youth. The proposals drew more than 30,000 public comments, including opposition from the American Medical Association and the Children's Hospital Association.
Alaska Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher and U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon signed a "confidential memorandum of understanding" on December 19, 2025, alongside Alaska turning over a copy of its voter rolls to the Justice Department. The agreement lets DOJ's Civil Rights Division notify Alaska of individual "voter list maintenance issues," requiring the state to act on that notice within 45 days by moving flagged voters toward removal and reporting back to DOJ. State officials dispute that the agreement permits DOJ to directly purge voters or that Alaska requested the arrangement; at least 11 other states have signed materially identical agreements.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed S.B. 293 on December 19, 2025, eliminating the state's four-day grace period that had allowed absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day to arrive and be counted up to four days after the election. DeWine acknowledged signing reluctantly, citing a pending U.S. Supreme Court case from Mississippi he feared might require elimination of all grace periods if left in place. An estimated 7,800 absentee ballots in Ohio's 2024 election had arrived within that window and would have been discarded under the new law.
On December 18, 2025, President Donald Trump signed S.1071, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026 (Public Law 119-60), into law. The act bars individuals whose sex is male from competing on female-designated teams at the U.S. military service academies and prohibits the Department of Defense from maintaining any diversity, equity, and inclusion office or plan or recognizing employee resource groups organized around characteristics including sexual orientation or gender identity. The Senate passed the conference version 75-22 and the House 312-112.
On December 18, 2025, Joint Task Force Southern Spear carried out two successive lethal strikes on vessels in the eastern Pacific Ocean — the 27th and 28th of the campaign — killing five people in total, according to U.S. Southern Command. The command asserted the boats were operated by designated terrorist organizations on known narco-trafficking routes but provided no charges, evidence, or attempt at interdiction or arrest. The strikes pushed the campaign's reported cumulative death toll past 100.
Dominica's Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit announced on January 5, 2026 that his government had signed an agreement, dated to diplomatic notes from December 17, 2025, to accept third-country nationals the U.S. cannot deport to their countries of origin. The deal followed a December 16, 2025 U.S. proclamation restricting entry for Dominican nationals, and Skerrit declined to disclose which countries the transferred individuals would come from.
On December 17, 2025, at the direction of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing four people. U.S. Southern Command described the boat as operated by a designated terrorist organization along a known narco-trafficking route, but provided no charges, judicial process, or independent evidence. The same day, Senate war-powers resolutions intended to constrain the campaign failed to reach the floor.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested 24-year-old Vanessa Parrazal in Salisbury, Maryland on December 17, 2025, minutes after she dropped her daughter off at Pinehurst Elementary School. When Parrazal did not exit her vehicle, agents smashed the driver's-side window and forcibly removed her, an encounter witnesses captured on video and neighbors described as traumatizing. ICE said Parrazal resisted arrest and was extracted for officer safety, while Wicomico County Sheriff Mike Lewis said the agency had lawful authority to make the arrest.
On December 16, 2025, President Trump announced via Truth Social that he had ordered a "complete blockade" of all U.S.-sanctioned oil tankers going to and from Venezuela, declaring the country "completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America." The unilateral order — issued without congressional authorization — became the operational basis for a wave of Coast Guard tanker seizures and interdictions off Venezuela in the days and weeks that followed.
On December 16, 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded indefinite-delivery "skip tracing" contracts worth up to $1.2 billion over two years to 13 private companies, among them B.I. Incorporated, the wholly owned subsidiary of private-prison operator GEO Group, whose award is valued at up to $121 million. Under the contracts ICE furnishes each contractor with roughly 50,000 people's last known addresses and identifying information every month, and the contractors mine commercial databases and physically observe those people, returning time-stamped photographs of homes and workplaces. Reporting by The Intercept, Source Material and Bloomberg News established that the program reaches people on ICE's non-detained docket nationwide and that the agency told contractors a report may be followed by "an enforcement action."
On December 15, 2025, a Trump White House deputy assistant emailed officials at the Departments of Energy, Transportation, Interior, and Agriculture and the Office of Management and Budget, directing them to identify actions "with respect to Colorado" to keep "grants and federal support...in line with administration priorities," hours before President Trump publicly called Colorado Gov. Jared Polis "weak and pathetic" over the imprisonment of former county clerk Tina Peters. In the days that followed, the Department of Energy canceled $615 million in Colorado funding, the Department of Transportation ended $109 million in grants, the Office of Management and Budget moved to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, and the Department of Agriculture ordered an accelerated food-assistance recertification review. The email became public on August 11, 2026 at a federal court hearing in Colorado's retaliation lawsuit against the administration, where a judge called it "extraordinary" and ordered the White House to produce more records, while the administration denied the actions were tied to Peters.
On December 15, 2025, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem published a Federal Register notice terminating Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopia, effective February 13, 2026, stripping protected status from roughly 5,000 Ethiopian nationals. DHS said country conditions in Ethiopia had sufficiently improved, a rationale the State Department's own concurrent Level 3 "reconsider travel" advisory -- citing active armed conflict, crime, kidnapping, and terrorism -- contradicted. A federal judge initially postponed the termination as likely arbitrary and pretextual before ultimately allowing it to take effect in August 2026.
On December 15, 2025, at the direction of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear carried out lethal strikes on three vessels in the eastern Pacific Ocean — the 23rd strike of Operation Southern Spear — killing eight people. U.S. Southern Command asserted the boats belonged to designated terrorist organizations transiting known narco-trafficking routes but filed no charges, released no evidence, identified no individuals, and reported no attempt at interdiction or arrest. Lawmakers from both parties questioned the legality of the strikes as the campaign's reported death toll reached approximately 95.
ICE arrested Dulce Consuelo Diaz Morales, 22, during a December 14, 2025 traffic stop in Baltimore and detained her for 25 days across five facilities in Louisiana, Texas, and New Jersey, despite her Laurel, Maryland birth certificate, hospital and immunization records, and birth-witness affidavits. DHS disputed her citizenship, citing a 2023 Customs and Border Protection encounter near Lukeville, Arizona, and an in-absentia removal order issued in January 2025, while a federal judge barred her removal pending litigation and she was released January 7, 2026 under ICE supervision.
Jean Wilson Brutus, a 41-year-old Haitian national, died on December 12, 2025, at University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey — roughly one day after entering ICE custody at the GEO Group-operated Delaney Hall Detention Facility. ICE reported he showed no signs of distress at intake and listed the cause of death as "unknown." His family and advocates sought an independent autopsy and called for the facility's closure; Brutus was believed to be the first detainee to die at Delaney Hall since it opened in May 2025.
St. Kitts and Nevis Prime Minister Terrance Drew announced January 8, 2026 that his government had entered a Memorandum of Understanding with the United States, dated to December 12, 2025, allowing the transfer of CARICOM nationals — excluding Haitians and anyone with violent or sexual-offense records — who cannot be returned to their own countries. The first group, three people from Jamaica and Belize, was accepted in May 2026.
Oregon's Government Ethics Commission unanimously found on December 12, 2025 that state Rep. Greg Smith, executive director of the Columbia Development Authority of Boardman, used a 2024 federal grant application to secure himself a $66,000 raise on his $129,000 salary without his board's approval, then signed his own timecards and approved his own paid time off -- including more than 54 vacation days between December 2024 and August 2025 -- worth more than $51,000 over three years. Smith signed a consent order on July 16, 2026 agreeing to pay a $12,000 civil penalty without admitting intentional wrongdoing, and has not repaid the roughly $33,000 in retroactive pay his board ordered returned after discovering the raise.
On December 11, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14365, "Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence," directing the Justice Department to establish an AI Litigation Task Force to sue states over AI laws the administration considers excessive. The order also instructs the Commerce Department to identify conflicting state laws and to condition states' access to federal broadband (BEAD) funds on compliance, and directs all federal agencies to weigh conditioning discretionary grants on states not enacting conflicting AI legislation — achieving through executive action what Congress had not enacted.
On December 11, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division sued Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, seeking to compel production of the state's complete, unredacted voter registration database, including voters' full names, dates of birth, and driver's-license or Social Security number fragments. The suit, filed under the Civil Rights Act of 1960, followed Griswold's May and December 2025 refusals to share the unredacted data and a November 2025 letter, which she led with nine other secretaries of state, asking DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security to clarify how the collected data would be used and shared.
On December 11, 2025, ICE agents detained Diego Hernandez Garcia, a 24-year-old Salvadoran construction worker with Special Immigrant Juvenile Status and deferred action valid through May 12, 2026, during a raid on a Hardin Valley, Tennessee job site; USCIS revoked his deferred action the same day, after he was already in custody. On December 23, despite a federal court order requiring he remain in the U.S. pending his case, ICE placed him on a flight to El Salvador; he was returned hours later after his attorney intervened, with the government calling the removal "inadvertent."
On December 10, 2025, U.S. forces seized the crude-oil tanker Skipper off the coast of Venezuela in a pre-dawn operation launched from the USS Gerald R. Ford, boarding the vessel with Coast Guard and Marine personnel under a DOJ civil-forfeiture warrant. President Trump announced the seizure at a White House event, declaring the U.S. would keep the roughly 1–2 million barrels of Venezuelan crude on board. The action — the first vessel seizure of a broader oil-blockade campaign — was carried out without congressional authorization; Venezuela condemned it as "an act of international piracy."
The U.S. Department of State proposed a third-country removal understanding to Burundi via diplomatic note dated December 8, 2025, explicitly contemplating the transfer of people who "raise national security or public safety concerns" — broader framing than most of the administration's other third-country notes. Burundi's government accepted, with a carve-out excluding people with violent criminal records, through a further exchange of notes completed February 12, 2026.
The United States and Cameroon reached a third-country removal agreement through diplomatic notes dated December 8, 2025, which were not made public until June 2026. At least 36 people have been forcibly sent to Cameroon across four flights between January and May 2026, many of whom had been granted U.S. humanitarian protections against return to their home countries.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order on December 8, 2025 designating the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Brotherhood as "foreign terrorist organizations," directing state agencies to deny contracts, employment, funds, and other material support to the groups and anyone supporting them. CAIR, which has more than 20 U.S. chapters and is not on the federal terrorist-organization list, sued days later alleging the order was unconstitutional and that DeSantis had usurped the federal government's exclusive authority to designate terrorist organizations.