Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) called on the Trump administration to designate the Council on American-Islamic Relations as a foreign terrorist organization over what he alleged to be the group’s links to a Muslim Brotherhood network in the United States. 

Cruz further asked FBI Director Kash Patel as he testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday if the bureau was “taking a very hard look at organizations with documented ties to terror financing, especially radical Islamic terror financing,” to which Patel responded affirmatively. 

Cruz noted CAIR’s reported ties to the Holy Land Foundation, which was shuttered for funneling resources to Hamas, and highlighted that CAIR “was named as an unindicted co-conspirator” in the 2008 case that resulted in the foundation and five of its co-founders being found guilty of providing material support to the terror organization. 

“I believe that the administration should designate CAIR [as a foreign terrorist organization]. They’re simply an unindicted co-conspirator,” Cruz said. “They have been designated by my home state of Texas as a terrorist organization and I am urging the administration to do the same. Focusing on threats and targeting them is the best way to keep America safe.”

Cruz has prioritized targeting the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates, especially in the last year, leading on legislation in the Senate to designate the group as a FTO. Following months of lobbying by Cruz, President Donald Trump signed an executive order last November designating specific regional chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as FTOs. 

The Texas senator also held a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing examining Muslim Brotherhood networks and affiliates in the U.S. last month, where he and the witnesses emphasized that CAIR leaders were part of a 1993 meeting of Muslim Brotherhood-linked anti-Israel activists, captured on an FBI wiretap, in which the activists plotted to undermine the Oslo accords and support Hamas through a range of spinoff and front organizations, including the Holy Land Foundation.

“The Holy Land Foundation prosecution revealed that these organizations do not operate in isolation; they function as part of a broader Muslim Brotherhood ecosystem,” Cruz said at the hearing in August. “The events we witnessed on college campuses after Oct. 7 [2023] did not emerge from nowhere. They were not spontaneous. They were not organic. They were the product of an organized network that has spent decades building influence inside the United States.”

A spokesperson for CAIR did not respond to Jewish Insider’s request for comment.