Trump moves to brand Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization again
The rebel group has been attacking shipping lanes for over a year.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order initiating a process to redesignate the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels as a foreign terrorist organization on Wednesday, returning the group to the same status it held at the end of his first administration.
"This order sets in motion a process by which Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis, shall be considered for designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization," the executive order said, noting that the group has "fired at U.S. Navy warships dozens of times since 2023, endangering American men and women in uniform," and attacked more than 100 commercial ships, killing four civilian sailors.
The order goes on to direct Secretary of State Marco Rubio to submit a report to the president on designating the Houthis as a FTO within 30 days and then "take all appropriate action" with regard to the designation within 15 days after that.
If the Houthis are designated as an FTO at that point, the order instructs the U.S. Agency for International Development to work with the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations and contractors to identify partners in Yemen who have made payments to Houthi rebels or entities they control, criticized efforts to counter the Houthis or failed to document abuses committed by the group.
"The Administrator of USAID shall take all appropriate action to terminate the projects, grants, or contracts identified," the order said.

Rubio has previously voiced support for labeling the Houthis as a FTO and is expected to move forward with the designation.
During the waning weeks of his first term, Trump's State Department designated the Houthis, who control large swaths of Yemen, as a FTO and a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" group. The Biden administration quickly undid both measures out of concern that the penalties they carry would limit the ability to supply Yemeni civilians with aid amid the country's grueling civil war.
However, after the Houthis began launching attacks on vessels transiting vital Middle Eastern shipping lanes following the onset of the Israeli-Hamas war, Biden officials moved to reimpose the Specially Designated Global Terrorist label in January 2024. They opted against reinstating the more severe FTO designation out of concern it would adversely affect humanitarian support.
"A foreign terrorist organization designation ran the risk of having a deterrent effect on some of those aid groups continuing to provide aid -- worrying that they might be charged as providing material support to a terrorist organization," then-State Department spokesman Matthew Miller explained at the time.
Although FTO and SDGT designations are often used by the U.S. government in tandem, the FTO designation is considered to be a harsher punishment because it criminalizes providing any material support to the organization, automatically bars members of the group who are not American citizens from entering the United States and allows victims of the group's attacks and their survivors to sue for compensation.

In recent days, Houthi leaders have signaled that the group intends to scale down attacks on maritime traffic in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, indicating militants will only target Israeli vessels.
On Wednesday, the Houthis also released the crew of a seized cargo ship, the Galaxy Leader, which it seized in November 2023.
The vice president of the government of Yemen has credited Trump's return to the White House for motivating the Houthis to stand down, citing the president's leadership and willingness to employ the strength of the U.S. military.
The Houthis have said the change in posture is a response to a fragile ceasefire agreement taking hold in Gaza.
But the group's promises to limit attacks have done little to quell the concerns of global shipping companies, as the Houthis have often targeted ships with no connection to the conflict during its 15-month campaign -- even striking vessels destined for Iran, its chief financial and military backer.
While humanitarian groups remain concerned that Trump's renewed FTO designation could disrupt the flow of food, medicine and other key aid that two-thirds of Yemen's population relies on, Yemeni officials, Republican lawmakers and even some Democrats have argued in favor of reimposing the designation against the Houthis.
Moammar al Eryani, Yemen's minister of information and culture, decried the Biden administration's decision to stop at the SDGT designation, arguing it "gave Houthis more space to receive Iranian support and continue its destructive scheme and reinforced its sense that crimes against humanity could be overlooked under political pretexts."
By contrast, Eryani argued that the FTO label would "enable the international community to take decisive measures to deter them, dry up their sources of funding, and force them to surrender their weapons."
Ahead of Trump's executive order, a group of 15 Republican senators proposed legislation that would redesignate the Houthis as an FTO, and in November 2024, a bipartisan group of lawmakers wrote a letter to then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken asking him to reapply the label.