Ron DeSantis Goes Full Islamophobe With New Terrorist Designation

From here on out, a civil rights group will receive the same treatment in Florida as the likes of Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced Tuesday the implementation of the “anti-sharia law” he signed earlier this year, officially designating 90 groups as terrorist organizations, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, the largest Muslim advocacy group in the nation.

Florida’s authority on the matter superseded the State Department, which does not list CAIR as a terrorist organization, thanks to a state law (H.B. 1471) that went into effect in July. That allowed Florida’s domestic security chief to officially identify terrorist organizations without the involvement of the federal government.

The state government proceeded with the matter without input from the public.

The Muslim Brotherhood and antifa also received the terror group designation. Other groups targeted by the action include the Venezuelan crime syndicate Tren de Aragua, two Mexican drug cartels, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran.

The groundwork for the new labels came by way of an executive order DeSantis signed last December. At the time, CAIR’s Florida chapter sued DeSantis, claiming that the order, which stripped the group’s access to state resources, was unconstitutional.

Another lawsuit from the group is expected following DeSantis’s latest action.  

“There is nowhere in that notice any allegation or evidence that CAIR has engaged in any violent or dangerous act in violation of Florida or U.S. law,” Hina Shamsi, the director of the ACLU National Security Project, said Tuesday following the decision, noting that the ACLU plans to file for a preliminary injunction on behalf of CAIR’s Florida chapter. “And that’s the first requirement for something as serious as this.”

Shamsi added that the “relentless” effort to label CAIR as a terrorist organization is “unnecessary, unprecedented, and unconstitutional.”

The food delivery driver shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents last week, Venezuelan immigrant Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, was charged with one count of assaulting, resisting, interfering, and impeding a federal officer on Tuesday.

The Department of Justice accused Garcés Pérez of ignoring federal agents’ instructions and driving away from them when they tried to pull him over in Austin, Texas. As he left, the DOJ claimed, his driver’s side mirror hit one of the agents in the chest. An ICE agent said that after a short, high-speed car chase, Garcés Pérez tried to hit him with his car, at which point the agent said he shot into the car and hit Garcés Pérez in the back.

Parts of the incident were captured by a body camera, according to the DOJ, but only still images have been released to the public so far. Garcés Pérez disputes the government’s account, stating that a black SUV came out of nowhere and tried to hit his car while he was in the middle of a food delivery.

Garcés Pérez said that he thought the SUV was an aggressive driver and tried to drive away, only for the SUV to ram his car and turn on its police lights after the crash. He was then shot after the car was stopped, according to The New York Times.

Since the incident, Garcés Pérez’s lawyer Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch said that he has languished in ICE custody without adequate medical care, having spent just three hours in a hospital before being taken into ICE’s detention center in Pearsall, Texas, without being able to see his wife. A spokesperson for Lincoln-Goldfinch said in a statement Tuesday that the bullet is still lodged in Garcés Pérez’s body even after nearly nine days.

“Rather than provide the life saving medical care he needs, DHS and the government are playing games with his life,” the statement said.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is doing everything he can to clear the deck of battle-tested leaders as he prepares to drag President Donald Trump’s supposedly “six-week war” into its eighth month.

Hegseth is plotting to cut 20 percent of the Pentagon’s slots for admirals and generals, two officials told The Hill Tuesday. The secretary will formally announce the reductions during his State of the Force address in Quantico, Virginia, on Wednesday.

Hegseth has already overseen a vast reduction in the number of top-ranking military personnel. At the time of his confirmation, there were 10 four-star generals on active duty. Now there are just five—the smallest number to lead the service in years.

In May, Hegseth signed an order directing the U.S. military to slash the number of active-duty four-star generals, as well as general and flag officers, by 10 percent, and reduce the number of general officers in the National Guard by a minimum of 20 percent. At the time, Hegseth claimed the “Less Generals, More GIs” policy would allow for a leaner military structure, but provided no guidance for how these cuts ought to actually be made.  

In April, Hegseth fired Army chief of staff Gen. Randy George, and forced out at least three senior officers who were believed to be in the running to be George’s replacement. All in all, Hegseth has forced out at least half a dozen senior officers, undermining military readiness in the ongoing campaign in the Middle East. 

Hegseth’s leadership has come under increased scrutiny amid mounting reports that he concealed casualties among U.S. service members, depleted the U.S. military weapons stockpile, directed massive, unchecked government spending, and allowed horrific conditions aboard long-deployed U.S. ships that led to a number of attempted suicides. 

There’s also the matters of killing schoolchildren and nearly starting World War III—both tied to his overreliance on artificial intelligence.

Earlier this month, the House announced that it would end its voting session early in order to avoid an impeachment vote on Hegseth. The vote won’t take place until after the midterm elections, but a number of Senate Democrats have already signaled that supporting an impeachment vote against the secretary would be a worthwhile use of political capital, Punchbowl News reported Tuesday. 

The Supreme Court has decided that the Trump administration can resume deporting immigrants to countries other than their place of origin.

The nation’s highest judiciary on Tuesday paused a lower court ruling that blocked the government from deporting people to locations they had no relation to without due process. The decision came by way of an emergency ruling that did not include a vote count, though it did note that Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have denied the request to resume the deportations.

The Supreme Court is expected to pick the issue back up again in December when it will hear oral arguments. A final ruling is expected next year.

The outcome is a major win for the administration, which has spent more than a year and a half shipping people to countries around the world as part of its mass deportation program.

But it isn’t the first time that the court has weighed in on the matter. In June 2025, the court overruled a lower court decision regarding a class action lawsuit, granting the executive branch the ability to deport individuals without objection, even if the deportees are likely to face the risk of death or grave harm in the new locale.

The government has deported nearly a million people since Donald Trump returned to office, according to a CNN report published last week. Some of those individuals have been sent to countries with histories of human rights abuses.

At least 25,000 people have been deported from America to developing countries under the guise of Trump’s “secure the border” agenda, according to a social media post by Homeland Security’s legal chief James Percival last week, who added that “third country removal is an essential public safety tool.”

Such reasons, according to Percival, include the possibility that a home country might reject a person’s return, as well as the inordinate costs associated with actually sending an individual back to their country of origin, particularly if the country is far from the U.S.

“Imagine, for example, that DHS needs to remove a single illegal alien to a remote country halfway across the world. Is DHS supposed to spend a fortune chartering a private plane for one law breaker?” continued Percival.

Percival then echoed Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric, claiming that many of the immigrants facing third country deportations are the “worst of the worst” types of criminals, suggesting that these individuals—who are not tried before they are deported—are “child rapists” and “killers.”

“Before President Trump came along, the U.S. government typically just released these people after six months because they could not or did not care to find a third country,” Percival claimed.

This story has been updated.

It turns out that President Trump took money for his self-adulating ads from the Department of Homeland Security. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House paid for multiple pro-Trump ads specifically with money from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. 

The ads in question praise the president and highlight claims of his achievements in office. One of them plays the JMSN song “Love Me” as President Trump declares “America will never be a Communist country.” Another seemed to copy a 2024 campaign video, where a black-and-white Trump is walking while his voice talks about “the final battle.” Another shows pictures of Mount Rushmore while Trump narrates, “The United States of America is the most successful, most accomplished, most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history.”   

Trump reportedly was involved in the ads’ creation and pushed for them himself. They include a “paid for by the U.S. government” disclaimer, which would seem to violate federal laws, such as the Hatch Act, against the executive branch promoting political causes. The Trump administration claims they are public service announcements. 

In a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Tuesday, Democratic Senators Patty Murray and Chris Murphy said that “using government funding to create or air political ads like the ones that have been running over the last few days is illegal and a shockingly corrupt misuse of taxpayer dollars.” They reported that Trump has set aside $20 million of DHS funds for the ads.

“The American people deserve answers about how this president is literally stealing their tax dollars to air campaign ads celebrating himself—while doing nothing to help them afford health care or housing. These ads need to immediately come off the air, taxpayers need to be paid back for this theft, and everyone responsible needs to be held accountable for this corrupt and illegal propaganda,” the senators wrote. 

The ads have aired almost 90 times across national television as of Sunday on networks including MS NOW, CBS, Fox, and Newsmax, costing an estimated $337,000. They’ve also aired on local stations 2,311 times at an estimated cost of $1.4 million. 

“These public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad,” a White House spokesperson said last week. “The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic. We should be proud of our country.”