Through civil rights actions, media relations, civic engagement, and education, CAIR works to promote social, legal and political activism among Muslims in America.

[17][18] The bombing gave CAIR national stature for their efforts to educate the public about Islam and religious bias in America; their report was featured on the front page of The New York Times on August 28, 1995, and was subsequently mentioned on ABC World News Tonight.

[8] In 1996, CAIR began "CAIR-NET", a read-only e-mail listserve aimed to help American Muslims identify and combat anti-Muslim prejudice in the U.S. and Canada.

[27] By January 2002, four months after the attacks, the CAIR said that it had received 1,658 reports of discrimination, profiling, harassment, and physical assaults against persons appearing Arab or Muslim, a threefold increase over the prior year.

[29] In 2005, CAIR coordinated the joint release of a fatwa by 344 American Muslim organizations, mosques, and imams nationwide that stated: "Islam strictly condemns religious extremism and the use of violence against innocent lives.

Targeting civilians' life and property through suicide bombings or any other method of attack is haram or forbidden—and those who commit these barbaric acts are criminals, not martyrs.

"[30] The fatwa cited passages from the Quran and hadith that prohibit violence against innocent people and injustice, and was signed by the Fiqh Council of North America.

Along with 245 other organizations, they listed CAIR (and its chairman emeritus, Omar Ahmad),[42] Islamic Society of North America (largest Muslim umbrella organization in the United States), Muslim American Society and North American Islamic Trust as unindicted co-conspirators, a legal designation that can be employed for a variety of reasons including grants of immunity, pragmatic considerations, and evidentiary concerns.

[43] In 2007, the organization was named, along with 245 others, by U.S. Federal prosecutors in a list of unindicted co-conspirators or joint venturers in a Hamas funding case involving the Holy Land Foundation,[44] which in 2009, caused the FBI to cease working with CAIR outside of criminal investigations due to its designation.

[48][49] During a 2008 retrial of the HLF case, FBI Special Agent Lara Burns labeled CAIR "a front group for Hamas".

[55][56] The four Republican Congressmen, joined by Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Congressman Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), then wrote IRS Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman on November 16, 2009, asking that CAIR be investigated for "excessive lobbying".

[59] In January 2012, CAIR's Michigan chapter took a stance along with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in defending four Muslim high school football players accused of attacking a quarterback during a game.

[62] In 2021 the director of the San Francisco branch of CAIR, Zahra Billoo, gave a speech in which she denounced a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and stated that "We need to pay attention" to the ADL and Hillel, "because just because they are your friends today, doesn't mean that they have your back when it comes to human rights."

[67] CAIR has filed successful civil rights litigation on behalf of Muslim Americans who suffered employment discrimination due to their religion, including police officers[68][69][70][71] and hospital workers.

In 2003, CAIR along with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee filed suit in Muslim Community Association of Ann Arbor v. Ashcroft, which challenged the constitutionality of the USA PATRIOT Act.

[87][88] The case forced Congress to make substantial changes to Section 215 of the act, which helped it avoid being in violation of the First Amendment and had the effect of resolving the lawsuit.

Barack Obama had previously, during his presidency, imposed travel restrictions on the same Muslim-majority countries due to national security concerns and the potential for terrorism.

CAIR began maintaining a group of immigration lawyers in Chicago O'Hare airport after Executive Order 13769 went into effect[93] and caused the immediate revocation of over 100,000 temporary visas.

[94] CAIR litigated on behalf of Gulet Mohamed, a 19-year-old Virginia teenager who was kidnapped and tortured in Kuwait after the FBI placed him on a no-fly list.

[95][96] CAIR argued successfully that the teen's placement on the US no-fly list was "patently unconstitutional" and that Mohamed had a constitutional right to come home.

[107] NPR reported: "When concerned parties brought [gender bias] allegations to senior CAIR officials in Washington, D.C., and Florida, former employees said, there was little, if any, follow-up action.

[108] "Service Employees International Union Local 500 said in filings Wednesday that the Council on American-Islamic Relations was trying to bust its effort to organize the civil rights group's staff.

[119] Ghafoor helped establish the organization Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), which has focused part of its work on human rights violations in the UAE.

CAIR has claimed that "The real reason the UAE targeted Ghafoor became even clearer when Emirati media outlets began publishing unhinged, Islamophobic hit-pieces slandering him as a “terrorist” for his pro-democracy work with DAWN and other groups.

"[119] In an interview with Bret Baier of Fox News, UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan was asked about the designation of CAIR as a terrorist group, in which he responded: Our threshold is quite low when we talk about extremism.

"[129] Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof advocated for people to support and sign up as members of CAIR in response to the 2016 election of US President Donald Trump.

[130] In 2016, the University of Saint Thomas named the Minnesota branch of CAIR as the winner of its Winds of Change Award at its Forum on Workplace Inclusion.

[132] December 2023, the Biden administration cut off contact with CAIR after its executive director stated he was "happy to see" Palestinians break Israel's siege on the Gaza Strip on October 7.

[134] According to a CAIR press release, during his speech, Awad had also stated that, "The hatred, the prejudice, the violence, the discrimination against Jews because of their faith or their life or their religious practices is a hateful mindset, behavior and action.

“The average Palestinians who briefly walked out of Gaza and set foot on their ethnically cleansed land in a symbolic act of defiance against the blockade and stopped there without engaging in violence were within their rights under international law; the extremists who went on to attack civilians in southern Israel were not.