Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign is facing a citizenship controversy after an unearthed video showed the Michigan Democrat claiming a status his spokeswoman says he never held. The Senate candidate described himself as a dual citizen during a 2016 speech in Detroit. His campaign previously rejected the same claim when it appeared on an academic résumé. The dispute now includes both written and recorded statements.
El-Sayed was addressing a GlobeMed conference while serving as Detroit’s health director, speaking about his experiences growing up with family ties to Egypt. His parents moved from Egypt to the Detroit area in 1978, and he was born in Michigan in 1984. The Washington Free Beacon published the footage on Monday, October 5th, a decade after he delivered the remarks.
“I carry dual citizenship,” El-Sayed told the audience. He went on to describe spending most of his childhood summers abroad and learning what life was like without the right to self-government. The speech then turned to an encounter with Egyptian police. El-Sayed said officers questioned him during a summer visit after he publicly cursed Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president at the time.
As Breitbart reported on October 6th, the video follows an earlier citizenship claim on El-Sayed’s academic résumé. That document identified him as a citizen of both the United States and Egypt in 2014, when he was working in public health academia. The Free Beacon first questioned the campaign about the résumé in January. Its latest report adds a separate public statement made two years afterward.
Campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner gave the outlet a categorical answer when it asked about the résumé: “Abdul is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been.” She attributed the entry to information El-Sayed received from relatives as a child. According to Richner, he had been told his grandfather pursued Egyptian citizenship for him because both his parents were born in Egypt.
The Free Beacon’s January 9th report placed the résumé claim around the start of El-Sayed’s teaching career at Columbia. He graduated from Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in May 2014 and joined its Mailman School of Public Health that month as an assistant professor. Before that appointment, his résumé lists a project coordinator role at the school from October 2011 to May 2014. He remained at Columbia until returning to Detroit in 2015.
Watch El-Sayed’s citizenship statement here:
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The résumé listed his citizenships as “USA, Egypt” and appeared on the academic networking site Academia. It carried an October 2013 update date but included his May 2014 graduation and subsequent faculty appointment. The Free Beacon reported that the document was removed from Academia after the outlet sent it to his campaign. Copies of his résumé from 2012 and 2016 contained no citizenship information.
El-Sayed also recounted his visits to Egypt in his 2020 memoir, “Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey Into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic”. He described traveling there alone as a teenager to see his grandparents and extended family. His account of the confrontation over Mubarak included police arriving at his family’s apartment that night. He wrote that they backed off after he showed his American passport.
The October report said El-Sayed continues to recount the encounter with Egyptian police on the Senate campaign trail. The Free Beacon also reported that his campaign didn’t respond to questions about the newly uncovered 2016 statement. Richner’s earlier explanation was that El-Sayed and his family could find no documentation substantiating the citizenship account when they later investigated it. She described the résumé entry this way: “This was an error.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video.