Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing new scrutiny after an old résumé surfaced listing him as a dual U.S.-Egyptian citizen — a claim his campaign now says was wrong.
The résumé, uncovered by The Washington Free Beacon, dates back more than a decade to El-Sayed’s early academic career, when he joined Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. In it, El-Sayed listed his “citizenships” as “USA, Egypt.” His campaign later removed the document after questions were raised.
A campaign spokeswoman said El-Sayed has never been a dual citizen, calling the listing an error based on incorrect information passed down within his family. According to the campaign, no documentation supporting Egyptian citizenship was ever found, and El-Sayed later concluded the claim was inaccurate.
El-Sayed, who was born in Detroit to Egyptian immigrant parents, is running in a competitive Democratic primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat in 2026. Republicans are coalescing around former Rep. Mike Rogers, who launched another Senate bid following his narrow loss in 2024.
According to The Washington Free Beacon:
In his 2020 memoir, Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey Into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic, El-Sayed writes at length of spending his “summers in Egypt” as a teenager, traveling there alone to visit his grandparents and extended family. U.S. passport holders can obtain a single-entry tourist visa upon arrival in Egypt for roughly $25. Dual citizens are not subject to the fee. As a frequent traveler to Egypt, El-Sayed would have gone through the entry process repeatedly.
During one visit as a young teen, El-Sayed said he protested the then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, according to his book. He claimed police showed up to threaten him at his family’s apartment that night, but they backed off after he showed them his “American passport.”
While in graduate school at Oxford University, El-Sayed also spent his winter vacation in Egypt in December 2010.
“I had just come back from Egypt, where I had spent the better part of the winter holiday visiting family and touring with some of my classmates,” he wrote. “Not two weeks had passed before what history would name the Arab Spring erupted.”
Michigan is widely viewed as the top Senate battleground of the cycle. While Rogers currently holds narrow leads in some matchups, strategists caution that the race remains far from settled.
For now, El-Sayed is betting that his background — as a former public health professor, Detroit health official, and Democratic gubernatorial candidate — can help him break through and energize liberal activists.
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How can anyone be a CITIZEN OF THE USA and also clam CITIZENSHIP I ANOTHER COUNTRY? George Clooney has NOTB LIVED IN THE USA FOR YEARS. HE JUST ANNOUNCED HE and HIS FAMILY ARE NOW CITIZENS OF FRANCE! YOU CANNNOT BE BOTH.
Our government is being overrun by criminals masquerading as politicians.