By Liv Caputo
(Source Florida Phoenix)
Schools tied to designated terrorist organizations must lose their state-sponsored tuition vouchers and college students supporting these groups must be expelled under legislation that won final passage Thursday.
Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to soon sign HB 1471 into law, largely because his office, according to the Tampa Bay Times, drafted the preliminary version of the measure, which allows him to deem groups “domestic terrorist organizations.”
“Once [terrorist groups] have gone through the judicial process [and] it’s been deemed that they are in fact committing domestic terrorism in our country, at that point if you are a student that says, ‘I wanna hold my flag for a certified domestic terrorist organization,’ and you try to promote other students into that organization, you can be expelled,” said bill sponsor Rep. Hillary Cassel, a Broward Republican.
“The only people surrendering their children to terrorism are the people who are gonna vote no on this bill,” she added, responding to Democrats’ claims that the bill unfairly targets a single religion, infringes on constitutional rights, and operates similarly to the KKK.
It passed the House in an 80-25 vote along party lines. It had passed the Senate, 25-11, last week.
The wide-ranging bill’s original draft was sent just weeks after the Florida Cabinet publicly questioned whether it is legal for Islamic schools supposedly promoting Sharia law to receive taxpayer-funded school scholarships.
In 2023, the DeSantis administration deactivated two university chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine after a top university official claimed they were supporting terrorists.
A federal judge last week temporarily blocked DeSantis from designating a group he’s long-feuded with, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, as a terrorist group.
HB 1471 empowers Florida’s chief of domestic security — who is the head of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Mark Glass — to designate a group as a domestic or foreign terrorist organization.
The governor and Cabinet could approve or deny any such designation. Students who “promote” a terrorist organization — which means supporting its “extralegal violence” — would be expelled, and schools tied to these organizations would lose their voucher funding.
On Oct. 27, the governor and Cabinet derided two Tampa Islamic schools — Hifz Academy and Bayaan Academy — that brought in more than $18 million in scholarship funds through the voucher system during the past decade. One Bayaan employee is allegedly related to a founder of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood, which DeSantis has deemed a terrorist organization.
“Sharia law seeks to destroy and supplant the pillars of our republican form of government and is incompatible with the Western tradition,” said Attorney General James Uthmeier at the time. “The use of taxpayer-funded school vouchers to promote Sharia law likely contravenes Florida law and undermines our national security.”
Neither school’s website mentions specifically teaching Sharia law, which is Islam’s legal system derived from the Quran.
On Nov. 20, the Tampa Bay Times reported, a DeSantis staffer emailed the bill’s draft to Republican Sen. Erin Grall, who later sponsored it. The proposal would give him authority to label groups as “domestic terrorist organizations.”
A linked bill, HB 1473, will also go to the governor. It exempts from public record disclosure security-sensitive information within the written notice provided by the chief of domestic security to the governor and Cabinet.
“This bill is an abuse of power,” said Jacksonville Rep. Angie Nixon, a Democrat. She said it reminds her of the Ku Klux Klan.
Reaction
Common Cause Florida Executive Director Amy Keith issued a written statement decrying the vote.
“This fundamentally un-American bill gives the Governor and Cabinet the power to blacklist organizations through a secret process, stripping them of funding and punishing their supporters. This is especially dangerous right now, because it will come into effect at a time when the Governor has appointed a majority of the Cabinet,” he said.
“We can’t be a free people if the Governor can violate our rights to free speech and free association, without due process or a court conviction. We expect the courts to strike down this violation of Floridians’ constitutional rights.”
Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, also commented.
“Courts have already made clear that ‘the government cannot do indirectly what it is barred from doing directly.’ Public officials cannot threaten consequences for those who work with, platform, or associate with a group of people who are targeted by the government for speech with which the government disagrees. When this happens, the result is predictable: people withdraw, partnerships collapse, and lawful advocacy disappears from the public square. Advocacy disappears not because it was unlawful, but because the government has created a climate of intimidation around it. That kind of coercion strikes at the heart of the First Amendment and undermines the basic democratic principle that advocacy and dissent must remain free from government retaliation,” she said in a written statement.
“If dissent can be labeled terrorism, democracy cannot survive. The Constitution places a heavy presumption against systems that allow government officials to silence expression. Our democracy depends on the freedom to criticize those in power, to organize around shared values, and to advocate for change without fear that the government will label those efforts a security threat.
This story has been updated to include reaction.
