Contradictory Citizenship Claims by Michigan Senate Candidate

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed previously claimed during a 2016 speech that he held dual citizenship with Egypt and the United States, which contradicts his campaign’s current assertion that he has never held dual nationality.

A video released by the Washington Free Beacon highlighted this claim, showing El-Sayed speaking at a GlobeMed conference when he was serving as Detroit’s health director. This statement follows a similar mention of dual citizenship on his academic résumé from 2014.

During the conference, El-Sayed said, “I carry dual citizenship, and I grew up spending most of my summers in another country where I understood what it meant not to have the right to self-govern.” He went on to share an incident involving Egyptian police during a summer visit, detailing how he was questioned after expressing his criticism of then-President Hosni Mubarak. He recalled this experience throughout his Senate campaign.

This recent revelation adds to previous instances where El-Sayed identified as a dual citizen, despite his campaign’s emphasis on denying any such citizenship status.

The Free Beacon first flagged this issue after uncovering a résumé from 2014 that indicated El-Sayed as a citizen of both countries while he was engaged in public health academia.

Roxie Richner, a spokesperson for El-Sayed’s campaign, explained to the Free Beacon that the résumé’s information was based on what he had been told by family members during his childhood.

“Abdul is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been,” Richner stated. She noted that El-Sayed had been informed that his grandfather had sought Egyptian citizenship for him because both his parents were born in Egypt. However, according to Richner, El-Sayed’s family could not provide any documentation to support this claim when he later attempted to investigate.

“This was an error based on what he was told by family members secondhand,” she remarked, adding that attempts to verify the claim were unsuccessful. The campaign’s explanation addressed the résumé discrepancy but did not clarify El-Sayed’s statements made in the 2016 video.

The two claims, separated by a two-year gap, do not provide clear evidence of his legal citizenship status, which remains a point of contention for his campaign.

El-Sayed was born in Michigan in 1984, with his parents having emigrated from Egypt to the Detroit area in 1978, as reported.