We Muslim voters have been patient. But we’ve had enough.

Before Florida made national news for trying to brand a civil rights group a terrorist organization, it was Texas that did it first. In November 2025, Gov. Greg Abbott declared the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) a foreign terrorist organization, a designation no federal authority recognizes. Last month, Florida officials paused Florida’s latest attempt after a federal judge blocked an earlier one for being blatantly unconstitutional.

I have spent three decades arguing that American Muslims should meet moments like this by engaging rather than withdrawing. I co-founded the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) on that premise. We trained community leaders to work with the FBI. We testified before Congress. We sat in White House meetings and briefed policymakers on how counterterrorism efforts could work without alienating the communities they depend on. 

The bet was straightforward: Participation would buy protection. But a bet is only as good as the other side’s willingness to pay out — and Texas just showed its hand.

CAIR’s 2026 civil rights report recorded 8,683 complaints nationwide last year, the most since it began counting in 1996, and named Texas one of five states where complaints have risen three years running. In March, roughly two dozen Islamic schools were shut out of the state’s new $1 billion voucher program over false claims of extremist ties. They were later reinstated, but only after a federal judge called their exclusion “troubling” and two lawsuits from Muslim parents. Anytime there is an international incident, mosques are put under increased surveillance, something Houston is not immune from. In July CAIR reported a 183% increase in incidents targeting mosques compared with the same three months last year.

This is more than one bad news cycle. It is the executive branch, state governments and law enforcement partnerships all moving in the same direction. The courts have held the line, barely, and that is precisely the problem. When the only institution reliably protecting American Muslims is the judiciary, engagement has narrowed to litigation. We are relying on courts to do what partnership once did.

Consider what that means in this city. Houston is home to the largest Muslim community in Texas and the American South, with more than 200 mosques and Islamic centers, physicians in the Texas Medical Center, engineers in the Energy Corridor and families who have built this place for two generations. These are the people a terrorist designation reaches: not a foreign network, but your neighbors.

My argument is not that American Muslims should retreat from public life. It is that we should renegotiate the terms, now, while we still have leverage, before the current arrangement hardens into precedent. That renegotiation has four terms.

I still believe what I believed in 1988, when we co-founded MPAC: that this country’s promises are real, and that the way to secure them is to participate in public life, not withdraw from it. But participation is a relationship, and relationships have terms. Ours were set 25 years ago, under conditions that no longer exist, by people who assumed good faith would be reciprocated. Renewing that belief now means renegotiating those terms, not abandoning the relationship.

The reciprocity has not arrived. Houston’s Muslim community has done everything asked of it, and its state government responded by calling its largest civil rights organization a terrorist group. We can wait and watch that become the settled arrangement. Or we can say plainly, while it still matters, what real partnership requires.

Salam al-Marayati is president and co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. An expert on Islam in the West, national security and Middle East politics, he has spoken at the White House and on Capitol Hill, represented the United States at international human rights forums, and written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.