The largest Muslim civil rights group in the US has sued the governor of Florida for designating it a "domestic terrorist organisation", potentially alongside some of the most deadly drug cartels in the Americas.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) filed the lawsuit on Thursday in partnership with non-profits The American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center, calling the new law "baseless".
The designation opens up Cair to "immediate and irreparable harm, including the shuttering of all their operations and advocacy in the state", the group said in a statement.
Florida has further listed the Muslim Brotherhood, which has no known operation in the US or a centralised headquarters globally, as a terrorist organisation, as well as "antifa", which is short for the anti-fascist movement. It also has no defined scope or location.
"Officials can brand nonprofit corporations with debilitating stigma and then use an array of state authorities to immediately silence and incapacitate the organization, its employees, its members, and a wide range of others associated with the group through extraordinarily broad and severe criminal, civil, and administrative penalties," Cair said.
