Why Did California Award This Alleged Hamas Front $40 Million?

Other states are trying to shutter CAIR branches. Gavin Newsom is writing them checks.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) presents itself as an innocuous Muslim civil rights group—a reputation it reinforces with litigation and claims of anti-Muslim bigotry. But the group finds itself under increasing scrutiny for alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoot, Hamas. Last November, Texas Governor Greg Abbott designated CAIR a terrorist organization. The following month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis followed suit, citing CAIR’s being listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terrorism financing case.

But as other states move to sideline CAIR, California is embracing this alleged terror front. CAIR-CA, the organization’s largest statewide affiliate, is flush with taxpayer cash. In the last five years, the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) has rubberstamped at least $41 million in funding to the group. The vast majority of that money, it turns out, comes from the federal government. These federal dollars are flowing into CAIR-CA’s coffers even after it was the target of a recent Department of Justice investigation.

This report—based on a trove of documents provided to us by the Intelligent Advocacy Network (IAN), a California-based nonprofit—reveals good reason for the DOJ to be digging into CAIR-CA. It also raises serious questions about why Gavin Newsom’s government is funding an organization with alleged terrorist ties.

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CAIR was founded in 1994 with the ostensible aim of advancing Muslim-American civil rights. The organization claims that it “is not and never has been an agent” or affiliate of “any militant group.” But the historical record offers justification to question that characterization.

CAIR’s co-founders, Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, were leading members of the U.S.-Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee. That committee “effectively became the US-based Hamas infrastructure,” according to a George Washington University Program on Extremism report. In an October 1993 meeting planned by the Palestine Committee—secretly monitored by the FBI—participants discussed how to support Hamas’s efforts as well as how to help derail the Oslo Accords.

A year later, CAIR was born, with Ahmad and Awad assuming leading roles. For 11 years, Ahmad served as CAIR’s national chairman. Awad remains CAIR’s national executive director.

Some of this information came to light during the 2007 Holy Land Foundation trial, which saw five of that sham charity’s leaders convicted for collectively funneling more than $12 million to Hamas. The investigation uncovered a network of Hamas-linked organizations. While CAIR was not prosecuted, the court found “ample evidence to establish” that it was associated with the Palestinian terror group. An FBI Special Agent reportedly testified at trial that CAIR was a “front group for Hamas.”

Lara Burns served as an FBI Special Agent for more the two decades and was the lead investigator on the Holy Land Foundation case. She currently serves as the head of terrorism research at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

“You can’t look at what CAIR is doing today in isolation,” Burns said. “The government established the fact [during the trial] that a conspiracy existed among these organizations, including CAIR, to support Hamas, and that acts were taken in furtherance of that conspiracy. . . . CAIR’s role was to operate an entity out of Washington, D.C. that would serve to defend the interests of the rest of the network—against scrutiny from the media, against scrutiny from law enforcement. . . . In my opinion, the executive director, Nihad Awad, and other components of CAIR that were a part of this original infrastructure, are still operating CAIR in furtherance of an agenda to support Hamas.”

CAIR-CA leaders have also engaged in pro-terror rhetoric. On October 7, 2023, the day of Hamas’s terror attack on Israel, Zahra Billoo, executive director of CAIR’s San Francisco office, posted to social media: “We are witnessing decolonization.” On July 31, 2024, following the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, Billoo again took to social media, where she declared him a martyr. On November 12, 2023, Hussam Ayloush, the CEO of CAIR-CA, likened Israel to Nazi Germany and claimed: “Israel should be attacked.”

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One would think that CAIR’s ties to an Islamist terror group would make government agencies pause before providing it with public funds. But under Governor Gavin Newsom, California’s state government has seemingly never met a “marginalized group” it did not want to shower with other people’s money. CAIR-CA is rolling in tax dollars.

In 2022, CDSS awarded CAIR-CA $7.2 million in federal funds via a state program to provide immigration-related legal assistance. For its part, CAIR-CA pledged to serve approximately 1,800 people through September 2024, and earlier this year, claimed to have fulfilled that promise “across . . . various subgrantees.” According to IAN, a public records request submitted to the CDSS did not confirm how many legal cases have been handled as part of the grant; in its most recent annual report, CAIR-CA said that it had helped “dozens of Afghan families” through the project. In September 2025, CDSS rubberstamped an additional $23 million in federal funds for CAIR-CA.

In 2024, CAIR-CA’s IRS filings revealed that it had distributed more than $4 million in subgrants to 39 organizations. Among these sub-grantees were various groups with Islamist ties. For example, CAIR-CA sub-granted roughly $185,000 to California chapters of the Muslim American Society (MAS). GWU’s Program on Extremism identifies MAS as an open “Brotherhood legacy group” in the U.S. In 2004, a top MAS official estimated that nearly half of the organization’s activists were Muslim Brotherhood members. (MAS, which did not respond to our request for comment, claims to have “no affiliation” with the Muslim Brotherhood.)

CAIR-CA also sub-granted $30,000 to the Islamic Society of Orange County, which has ties to an individual connected to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1992, ISOC’s director invited Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, also known as the “Blind Sheikh,” to deliver a lecture, during which he reportedly “dismissed” nonviolent interpretations of jihad. A year later, Rahman was charged with seditious conspiracy for his connection to the attack. (ISOC did not respond to our request for comment.)

In 2024, CAIR-CA sub-granted $117,000 to California “relief” chapters of the Islamic Circle of North America. ICNA was originally established as a U.S. affiliate of the Jamaat-e-Islami movement, whose founder’s ideology influenced the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. In addition, in 2000, a former ICNA president penned an article that seemingly endorsed the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in the U.S. (ICNA did not respond to our request for comment.)

CAIR-CA has claimed, however implausibly, that it has no control over the selection of its sub-grantees. In January 2026, the director of CAIR-CA, Hussam Ayloush, wrote to a congressional committee claiming that his organization “had no input or role” in determining the sub-grantees. Instead, he suggested that CDSS had selected them.

While CDSS told IAN that it “reviews and authorizes all . . . subgrantees,” the department did not release records showing that it approved or authorized the CAIR-CA sub-grants. Additionally, Alyoush’s signature appears on the sub-grant contracts, which, according to IAN, suggests that CAIR-CA exercised significant discretion over millions in federal tax dollars.

“Ayloush personally signed every one of these ALSP grants as executive director of CAIR-LA,” a spokesman for the Network Contagion Research Institute and IAN told the New York Post. “[A]n entity contractually charged with administering funds and subgranting services necessarily plays a role in identifying subgrantees and their performance under the grant.”

In response to our request for comment, a CAIR-CA spokesman called allegations against the organization “baseless” and “part of a broader defamation campaign.” “All contributions and grants that CAIR California receives are fully reported, accounted for, and used strictly for their intended purposes,” he said, “subject to rigorous internal and external auditing and reporting. This transparency is why both private and public funders have worked with us and continue to do so.”

In March 2025, IAN requested that the Department of Justice launch an investigation into CAIR-CA, stating that a “forensic audit” was needed to determine the scope of the organization’s “financial misconduct, compliance [breaches], and support for terrorism.” Three months later, the DOJ confirmed that an investigation was underway.

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Given California’s track record under Newsom—on whose watch the state has lost billions of dollars to fraud—taxpayers should not hold their breath that state agencies will hold CAIR-CA accountable. Nor should they expect California to come to its senses anytime soon and stop turning over buckets of tax dollars to a “civil rights” group with alleged ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

But the failures of California state government present an opportunity for the Trump administration. If the Department of Justice were officially and permanently to revoke CAIR-CA’s accreditation with the Executive Office for Immigration Review—a status that the group relies on to receive federal immigration funds—then tax dollars currently flowing into its coffers would be halted. In other words, the solution is simple: turn off the taps.

Ryan Thorpe is an investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute. Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution.