2016 video raises questions about El-Sayed’s citizenship status
A 2016 speech conflicts with the campaign’s account that the Michigan Democratic Senate nominee has never held Egyptian citizenship. El-Sayed said that he relied on family accounts of his grandfather applying for Egyptian citizenship when he said he was a dual citizen.
Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, said in a 2016 speech that he holds dual citizenship, according to a video the Washington Free Beacon published Oct. 5. His campaign says he is not a dual citizen and never has been.
“I carry dual citizenship, and I grew up spending most of my summers in another country,” El-Sayed said at a 2016 GlobeMed conference in Detroit, when he was the city’s health director.
Campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner told the Free Beacon, “Abdul is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been.”
She said he was told as a child that his grandfather had pursued Egyptian citizenship on his behalf, which she called an error based on what family members told him secondhand, and that he and his family later could not find documentation. When El-Sayed learned this could not be ascertained by Zeale News.
Richner gave the same account in January, when the Free Beacon reported that an academic résumé El-Sayed posted around 2014, when he joined Columbia University’s faculty, listed his citizenships as “USA, Egypt.”
In the 2016 clip, El-Sayed also describes being questioned by Egyptian police during a summer visit after he publicly cursed then-President Hosni Mubarak, a story the Free Beacon said he still tells on the campaign trail when referencing the importance of free speech in America.
El-Sayed, who was born in Michigan to parents who emigrated from Egypt in 1978, narrowly won the August Democratic primary over Rep. Haley Stevens. He faces Republican Mike Rogers in the Nov. 3 general election, with polls showing a dead heat.
The Constitution requires a senator to be at least 30, to have been “nine Years a Citizen of the United States,” and to be an inhabitant of the state when elected. It does not bar a senator from holding citizenship in another country.
Egyptian law, as described in a 2022 report by the European Union Agency for Asylum, extends nationality to anyone “born of an Egyptian father, or an Egyptian mother,” and says an Egyptian who acquires a foreign nationality without government permission “shall continue to be regarded in all cases as Egyptian.” El-Sayed’s campaign has not said whether his parents held Egyptian nationality when he was born, or whether either gave it up with Egyptian permission.
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