Washington, DC – As the United States and Israel continue to wage war with Iran, civil rights experts have noted a troubling trend: an ongoing rise in Islamophobia, even in the highest echelons of the US government.
Representative Andy Ogles, for example, has said, “Muslims don’t belong in American society”, adding that “pluralism is a lie”.
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His Republican colleague, Representative Randy Fine, has also amplified anti-Muslim rhetoric online.
“If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one,” he said one recent post. In another, Fine wrote: “Deport them ALL.”
In January, Representative Keith Self, also a Republican, shared on social media: “Islam is on the march and seeks world domination.”
Those kinds of statements, coupled with punitive actions under United States President Donald Trump, have created the environment for an increase in Islamophobia and discrimination in the US, according to advocates.
“This is an extreme language that is often used to advance extreme policies,” said Corey Sawyer, the research and advocacy director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a civil rights group.
CAIR released its annual report on Tuesday, which outlines what it sees as an increasingly hostile environment, one that began even before the outbreak of the war with Iran.
While the legal rights of Muslims in the country have not changed “on paper”, CAIR argues that those rights have been narrowed amid anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies.
That puts all US residents at risk, regardless of religion, the organisation said.
“In 2025, what we saw in the United States was a group of powerful public officials assert that freedom comes with conditions,” Sawyer said.
“You have to speak their approved lines. You have to worship in ways in which they approve. You should trace your ancestry to places that they approve of. And you should think the thoughts that they approve.”
Sawyer explained that the push to silence Muslim voices in the US was a symptom of a broader rollback of free-speech rights under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
“Protecting your right to be different and your right to dissent isn’t a favour to any one community,” Sawyer added. “That’s the operating system of a free country.”
‘Broad attack on Muslim life’
In Tuesday’s report, CAIR indicated its offices across the country received 8,683 complaints of anti-Muslim discrimination nationwide in 2025, a slight increase from the previous year.
It was the highest volume of complaints for CAIR since it began publishing its civil rights report in 1996.
Sawyer pointed to several factors that contributed to the uptick. The Trump administration, for example, has rolled back its civil rights operations at the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Education.
The White House has also led efforts to punish schools and students for their participation in pro-Palestinian protests and activities.
Then, there have been statements from the president himself, attacking Muslim-majority groups living in the US, including Somalis and Afghans.
Taken together, those actions amounted to a “broad attack on Muslim life” in 2025, Sawyer said.
Meanwhile, CAIR’s report said that “anti-Muslim narratives more clearly resurfaced in 2025, particularly the notion that the religious principles followed by Muslims are inherently threatening and anti-American”.
At least five pieces of legislation introduced on the federal level sought to “effectively ban the practice of the world’s second-largest religion in the United States or entry of its adherents into the nation”, the report said.
Several of those bills sought to ban so-called “sharia” practices, adopting “terminology developed by anti-Muslim extremists in the mid-2000s”, according to CAIR’s report.
CAIR also pointed to the creation of a so-called “Sharia-Free America Caucus” launched by Representatives Chip Roy and Keith Self last year, which currently claims 45 lawmakers as members.
The report said the caucus seeks to “advance the idea that Muslim religious identity disqualifies people from participation in American civic life”.
CAIR itself was targeted in 2025, with the governors of both Texas and Florida labelling the group a “foreign terrorist organization”.
The label carries no legal weight on the state level, and CAIR< has continued to operate in the states.
But it has filed lawsuits accusing the governors, accusing them of defamation and of seeking to trample the group’s First Amendment rights.
Trickledown effect from federal messaging
In addition to sounding the alarm about nationwide trends, Tuesday’s report drew a line between targeted actions in specific states and heightened pressure on individual Muslim-majority groups.
Minnesota, for instance, was a state where the Trump administration initiated a hardline immigration push in December and January.
The enforcement effort was dubbed “Operation Metro Surge”, and it came in response to a welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota that Trump blamed on the state’s large Somali American community.
In the lead-up to Operation Metro Surge, the president repeatedly made racist remarks about Somali Americans, referring to them as “garbage”.
CAIR’s report indicated that those federal actions resulted in the growth of anti-Muslim discrimination in the Midwestern state.
It identified Minnesota as one of five states — including Florida, Illinois, Oklahoma and Texas — where complaints of anti-Muslim discrimination have steadily risen over the last three years.
Minnesota saw a 96 percent increase from 2024 to 2025, with 23 percent of complaints lodged in the final month of last year.
CAIR’s report also cited heightened pressure on the Afghan community in the US.
Last November, an Afghan man was identified as a suspect in the fatal shooting of two members of the US National Guard in Washington, DC.
The Trump administration responded by imposing a blanket pause on Afghan visa and immigration processing. In the wake of the attack, CAIR said Afghans were “collectively treated as suspicious” in the US and faced increased scrutiny.
Impacts on education
On the state level, CAIR’s report identified actions in Texas and Florida as stigmatising aspects of Muslim life.
In Florida, for instance, lawmakers recently advanced a bill known as HB 1471, which includes punishments for schools and students linked to “foreign terrorist organisations”, as designated by the state. That could include the withholding of school voucher funds or expulsion for individual students.
While proponents of the law say it does not mention religion or nationality, critics point out that state authorities have already moved to label Muslim groups like CAIR as “terrorist” in nature.
“These efforts raise the risk of lawful Muslim participation in Florida civic life and contribute to a narrative that places Muslims as outside the circle of protected religious and civic engagement,” the report said.
Already, CAIR said dozens of pro-Palestinian student protesters and faculty supporters have faced an ongoing pattern of discrimination for their advocacy work, particularly since Trump returned to office in 2025.
Several, including Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Mohsen Madhawi and Badar Khan Sur, are currently embroiled in Trump-led efforts to deport them.
The Trump administration has also sought to penalise universities that saw pro-Palestinian protests unfold on their campuses.
Some top schools have faced civil rights probes and had their federal funds frozen. Others have been forced to accept settlements that involve multimillion-dollar fines.
The Trump administration has led such efforts under the auspices of combatting anti-Jewish sentiment.
But CAIR noted the Trump administration has relied on the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s (IHRA) definition of “antisemitism” in its justification, which is “widely seen as conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism”.
‘Deceiving you for their own purposes’
CAIR’s analysis echoes a separate report from the US Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), published on Monday.
That report concluded that the launch of the US-Israeli war with Iran “accelerated” the spread of harmful content targeting American Muslims.
Online commentators have increasingly adopted “dehumanising language” since the war began, referring to Muslims as “pests”, “rats”, “vermin”, “parasites” and an “infestation”, according to the CSOH report.
“Such language has historically preceded and enabled the most extreme forms of violence against targeted communities,” it warned.
On Tuesday, Sawyer rejected the narrative that Muslims are not a part of the United States’s social fabric, pointing out that they have been present in the US since its founding.
Looking forward, he warned of politicians seeking to use anti-Muslim rhetoric for political ends.
“Anyone who attempts to say that our country is anything other than a nation where many faiths thrive — and that Islam is an American religion — is deceiving you for their own purposes,” Sawyer said.
“We should all be very clear and aware of why politicians are putting forward certain agendas to exclude Americans from the ability to participate in the civic and religious life of this country.”
