In late November 2025, Greg Abbott kicked off his fourth run for governor by calling into a conservative North Texas radio show. On the air, he announced that he had signed a proclamation labeling the Council on American-Islamic Relations — the largest Muslim civil rights group in the country — a "foreign terrorist organization" and a "transnational criminal organization."

"No governor in America has done as much as I have to address this problem," he told the host. "Your religion cannot become a threat to our freedom."

Texas Monthly spent months figuring out where Abbott's evidence came from. Reporter Nicholas Gutteridge obtained more than 1,300 pages of emails through public-information requests. What he found is that the governor's terrorism designation reads a great deal like a 48-page opposition-research paper written by a fellow at a Washington think tank that the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an anti-Muslim hate group.

Twelve out of thirteen

Abbott's proclamation lays out thirteen main and supporting points about CAIR. According to Texas Monthly's comparison, twelve of them include details that appear in the think tank fellow's report. The one that doesn't cites a George Washington University study.

The overlap isn't just topical. It's granular:

• The proclamation lists allegations against eight people connected to CAIR, with short biographies of each. All eight appear in the report, "with similar language and descriptions."
• Both documents describe one man, Randall Todd Royer, using the same job title — "a communications specialist and civil rights coordinator for CAIR" — before mentioning his 2004 conviction on gun and explosive charges. Royer has since renounced his past, and in May 2025 Trump himself appointed him to an advisory board for the Religious Liberty Commission, alongside Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. Abbott is using as proof of terrorism a man the president put on a religious liberty board.
• Abbott quotes a sermon that CAIR's executive director gave at a Plano mosque. That sermon got essentially no press coverage. But a transcript of it sits in the report's materials, including the exact excerpt Abbott used.

When a governor's official terrorism designation matches an outside advocacy paper down to the job titles and the sermon excerpts, that's not two people independently reaching the same conclusion.

The claim about the FBI

The single most serious line in Abbott's proclamation is that the FBI has called CAIR a "front group" for Hamas. CAIR's leadership rejects it. Abbott provided no source for it.

So Texas Monthly went looking. The claim floats around right-wing sites, usually attributed to a 2008 federal terror-financing trial. Gutteridge spent days going through the trial transcripts.

He found that no FBI agent called CAIR a "front group" for Hamas.

But the phrasing does appear somewhere — verbatim, in the think tank fellow's report:

"CAIR has been labeled a front group for Hamas by an FBI agent during sworn testimony in a successful terror-finance prosecution in which CAIR is an un-indicted co-conspirator."

The report cited no evidence for it either.

This matters more than a footnote. Abbott used this designation to take real legal action against an American civil rights organization, and one of his central justifications appears to be a claim about the FBI that nobody can locate in the record.

How the material got into state government

The report's author is Robert "Duke" Bodisch, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and a retired Texas law enforcement official who once served as chief of staff and deputy director at the Texas Department of Public Safety.

In March 2025 — months before the proclamation — Bodisch emailed his CAIR paper to DPS director Freeman Martin. That same month, Abbott started directing state agencies to investigate the East Plano Islamic Center, a North Texas mosque and Muslim community, accusing it of building Islamic "no go zones" where only Muslims could live. The community denies it.

On the day Abbott ordered the Texas Rangers to open a criminal investigation, Bodisch wrote to the DPS director:

"Attached is a background paper I put together on CAIR, they are bad dudes and file lawsuits nearly every day. You may want to put this in your back pocket so you have good intel if and when they interfere."

That was one of more than thirty pieces of opposition research Bodisch sent Martin over the course of a year — articles, social media posts, and reports framing Texas Muslim communities as security threats. Martin's replies were short and friendly. "Thanks Duke." When Bodisch flagged what he called "a new Muslim-only project right here in Austin," Martin wrote back: "First I've heard of this one."

Texas Monthly is careful on one point, and so are we: it's not established that Bodisch's CAIR report reached the governor's office. What is established is that Abbott's proclamation cites the DPS director — and that when Texas Monthly asked for the emails between DPS and Abbott's team about the proclamation, DPS refused to release a single record, claiming six separate legal exceptions including attorney-client privilege.

If the source material were ordinary, there would be nothing to withhold.

Who the think tank is

The Center for Security Policy was founded by Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official. The SPLC's file on the group says it went "from a hawkish think tank focused on foreign affairs to a conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the anti-Muslim movement in the United States," and is known for claiming a shadowy Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated every level of American government.

It's the same outfit behind the poll Trump waved around in 2016 when he called for banning Muslims from entering the country. That poll was an opt-in online survey — anyone anywhere could click through and answer — and was widely discredited.

Eli Clifton, a journalist who has covered the group for over a decade, told Texas Monthly: "They certainly do whatever they can to demonize Muslim Americans."

Abbott's press secretary, Andrew Mahaleris, wouldn't say whether the group or Bodisch's report was used as source material. He said the proclamation "speaks for itself" and that "Texans expect their elected officials to take strong action against terrorist groups."

What the designation actually did to Texans

This isn't symbolic. Here's the chain of events Abbott set off:

• The designation banned CAIR from buying real estate in Texas and authorized Attorney General Ken Paxton to sue to shut the organization down. Paxton filed that suit in February 2026.
• One day after the proclamation, Abbott urged DPS and local police to investigate alleged "sharia tribunals" in North Texas. The next day, he ordered DPS to open a criminal investigation into CAIR's finances.
• In December 2025, the acting state comptroller asked Paxton whether schools that had merely hosted CAIR events could be cut out of Texas's new school-voucher program. Paxton said yes. That produced a civil rights lawsuit that is still going.
• Also in December, Abbott wrote to the U.S. Treasury Secretary asking that CAIR's tax-exempt status be suspended — citing his own proclamation as the evidence.

Read that last one twice. Abbott issued a proclamation built substantially on an advocacy group's paper, then submitted the proclamation to the federal government as proof.

CAIR's Texas chapters sued Abbott days after the announcement, arguing he violated federal law and their right to due process. That case is ongoing too.

In late December 2025, Abbott told Fox News what the goal was:

"We will purge them from our state. They should be purged from our country."

The part that should worry every Texan

You do not have to hold any opinion about CAIR, its politics, or its leadership to see the problem here.

A governor used the machinery of the state to brand an American nonprofit a terrorist organization. The evidence tracks a hate-group think tank's opposition research. One of the central claims appears to be false. The state police won't release the emails. And the same governor is now telling Texans, on a campaign radio hit, that a religion practiced by hundreds of thousands of his own constituents is "a threat to our freedom."

If the standard of proof for calling Texans terrorists is a PDF somebody emailed to a state agency, then the standard applies to whoever is next.

Source

• Nicholas Gutteridge, Who's Influencing Greg Abbott's War on CAIR?, Texas Monthly (July 29, 2026). Photo: Texas Monthly.