Governor of Texas Greg Abbott attends the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) USA 2026 at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center, in Grapevine, Texas, US, March 27, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Callaghan O’Hare

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) on Wednesday announced that a US federal court granted major portions of Texas’s discovery requests against the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), representing significant progress in the state’s legal case to designate the controversial advocacy group as a terrorist organization.

The approved request means that CAIR will have to hand over information including donor lists, award recipients, and records tied to travel by longtime CAIR executive director Nihad Awad to countries described by Abbott as “hosting Islamic terror.”

“Progress in my legal fight against CAIR,” Abbott posted on X. “I demanded CAIR give us its donor list, donee list, and details for Nihad Awad’s travel to 9 countries hosting Islamic terror. A federal court granted my request.”

The ruling, issued by the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, marks one of the most serious legal setbacks CAIR has faced in years as Republican officials intensify scrutiny of the organization’s funding networks and alleged foreign connections.

Court documents show the judge granted in part motions from Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seeking extensive discovery from CAIR entities. Among the requests approved by the court were demands for documents identifying donors who gave $5,000 or more over the past decade.

The order also states that donor records with names redacted would be “insufficient,” signaling the court’s willingness to force disclosure of information CAIR has long argued should remain private.

Abbott has accused CAIR of operating surreptitiously while exerting significant political influence across the country. His administration has argued that Texans deserve transparency regarding the organization’s donors, overseas relationships, and internal financial networks.

The legal proceedings began in November, when Abbott formally designated CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations under state law, citing in part what officials described as longstanding ideological and operational ties with Islamist movements hostile to the US and its allies.

“The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world,'” Abbott said in a statement announcing the move. “These radical extremists are not welcome in our state and are now prohibited from acquiring any real property interest in Texas.”

Abbott’s proclamation described CAIR as a “successor organization” to the Muslim Brotherhood and noted the FBI called it a “front group” for “Hamas and its support network.” The document also outlined the history of the organizations and their historical associations with figures and networks tied to Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group.

CAIR has denied any ties to terrorism and portrayed the Texas investigation as an attack on Muslim civil rights advocacy.

But critics of CAIR have increasingly pointed to the organization’s history of controversy surrounding extremist rhetoric and its past scrutiny by federal investigators. Awad himself drew backlash after publicly expressing support for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, saying he was “happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land.”

In the 2000s, CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association'” of CAIR with Hamas.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.'”

CAIR leaders have also found themselves embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities in southern Israel, in some cases for associating with US-designated terrorists.

The latest court ruling does not resolve the broader lawsuit, which remains ongoing, but it hands Abbott and Paxton a major procedural victory in a case that is increasingly drawing national attention.