In 2016, Abdul El-Sayed told a Detroit audience that he had “dual citizenship,” and now his campaign is saying that isn’t true.
A recently resurfaced video, reported on by Washington Free Beacon, shows El-Sayed making the statement at a GlobeMed conference when he was serving as Detroit’s health director.
Watch:
“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 said.
According to The Beacon, this was “at least the second time El-Sayed has publicly claimed to have Egyptian status.”
“His academic résumé stated in 2014 that he was a citizen of the United States and Egypt, the Washington Free Beacon previously reported,” the outlet noted.
The Senate candidate’s campaign explained that this was a misunderstanding, and that El-Sayed does not have dual citizenship with any other country.
“Abdul is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been,” said Roxie Richner in a statement to Free Beacon, adding that the candidate was “told as a child that his grandfather had pursued Egyptian citizenship on his behalf, for which he was eligible due to his parents being born in Egypt.”
“This was an error based on what he was told by family members secondhand. When he tried to verify this later on in life, he and his family were unable to find any documentation to verify this claim.” Richner said.
More from the outlet:
El-Sayed has expressed mixed feelings about his ancestral homeland. He has criticized secular Egyptian presidents like Mubarak and Abdel el-Sisi, while praising its Islamist leaders. In 2012, he signed an open letter alongside “leaders of the Egyptian community” that urged the repressive Muslim Brotherhood and then-president Mohamed Morsi to “purge the media and police” in order to solidify the Islamist group’s power.
ADVERTISEMENTEl-Sayed has referred to Bassem Youssef, an antisemitic pundit who claims Israel was behind 9/11, as a “fellow Egyptian.”
“He’s hilarious,” El-Sayed said of Youssef.
It remains to be seen if the campaign will go out of its way to clear up questions about El-Sayed’s foreign ties before the election, or if they will choose to focus on other issues and hope voters aren’t concerned by the lack of clarity.
X users reacted:
I can’t believe this is going on in America…. Democrats have been working on this for years.
— Lainey 🇺🇸❤️👏 (@2024Lainey) October 5, 2026
Does this guy tell the truth about anything?
— Coco’s Brushfire 🔥🇺🇸 (@cocosbrushfire) October 5, 2026
So was he lying then or is he lying now?
Or is this another one of those, “I was told I had high cheekbones yada, yada, yada, I’m Cherokee”?
— The Total Package (@TotalPackage25) October 5, 2026
He comes here condemning big oil billionaires who supposedly rule this country while almost every Muslim country in the world is totally controlled by big oil billionaires. He’s spearheading a blatant taquiya operation
— Richard Young (@R_A_Young) October 6, 2026
This fella is a walking contradiction.
— Jonathan Dunn (@_Jonathan_Dunn) October 6, 2026
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
Sierra Marlee is a millennial whose hunger for the truth in a world of fake news has led her to write. Marlee also contributes to BizPac Review.
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