A newly surfaced 2016 video shows Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed telling a Detroit crowd, in his own words, that he “carries dual citizenship” with Egypt, even as his campaign insists today that he never held it.
Story Snapshot
- A 2016 clip shows El-Sayed telling a Detroit audience he “carries dual citizenship” and grew up spending summers in another country.
- His campaign now says he “is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been,” calling the earlier claim a family-passed error.
- Representative Anna Paulina Luna called El-Sayed a “huge problem” and said dual citizens “have no place in Congress.”
- Federal law does not ban dual citizens from serving in Congress, so the fight is really over trust, not legal eligibility.
The Video That Won’t Go Away
The footage shows El-Sayed addressing a Detroit conference nearly a decade ago, saying plainly, “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”. That is not a reporter’s paraphrase. It is El-Sayed, on camera, describing his own legal status in his own words, long before he became a statewide candidate facing this kind of scrutiny.
Columbia Profile Adds to the Paper Trail
The video is not the only data point. Reporting from the Washington Free Beacon found El-Sayed had listed “USA, Egypt” as his citizenships on an academic networking profile while he worked as an assistant professor at Columbia University. His campaign called that listing a secondhand mistake, something passed down through family rather than a deliberate legal claim. Two separate records, from two different points in his career, both point the same direction.
The Campaign’s Denial Gets Harder to Square
Campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner told reporters flatly that “Abdul is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been”. That is a clean, confident denial. It just does not explain why El-Sayed himself said otherwise on video, or why his own academic profile once listed Egypt alongside the United States. Voters are left to decide whether two documented instances were both innocent slips, or whether the campaign’s current story is the one that needs fixing.
To be fair, no public record in this dispute proves El-Sayed’s current legal nationality one way or the other. His past statement and his old profile listing are not a court filing or a State Department determination. The dispute, as it stands, is a clash between what he said and wrote years ago and what his campaign says now, not a settled legal finding.
Luna Frames It as a Loyalty Test
Representative Anna Paulina Luna did not treat this as a technicality. She told Newsmax that El-Sayed represents a “huge problem,” citing both the citizenship question and what she described as his refusal to condemn the Muslim Brotherhood. Her position reflects a view shared by many conservatives: a lawmaker’s foreign ties and public statements about hostile groups deserve real scrutiny before voters hand that person a seat in the United States Senate.
What the Law Actually Says
Dual citizenship does not legally disqualify anyone from serving in Congress. The Constitution sets age, residency, and citizenship requirements, but it does not bar someone who also holds citizenship elsewhere. Federal case law has even protected Americans from having their citizenship stripped against their will. So Luna’s objection is less about eligibility and more about whether voters should trust a candidate whose own past statements conflict with his campaign’s present-day denials.
A Pattern Beyond Citizenship
This is not the first time El-Sayed has faced questions about where he stands and dodged a clean answer. Pressed on Israel, he has argued the real question “isn’t about the theoretical right to exist of a country that exists,” but whether Israel has “a right to our tax dollars”. He has also pushed back hard on reporters who keep asking about his opposition to aid for Israel, at one point suggesting the scrutiny was tied to his name and faith rather than his actual positions.
Why This Story Will Follow Him to Election Day
Michigan voters now face a candidate whose own recorded words contradict his campaign’s talking points, on a subject as basic as his own citizenship. Whether that reflects a youthful slip of the tongue or something his campaign would rather voters forget, the video exists, the profile existed, and the denial has to answer for both. In a Senate race this close, that kind of credibility gap rarely stays buried.
Luna’s broader point stands on its own regardless of how the citizenship question resolves. Americans running for federal office should be able to explain their own past statements clearly and consistently, especially when those statements touch on foreign loyalty and national security. El-Sayed’s campaign has a chance to clear this up with documents, not just denials, and Michigan voters deserve that clarity before they cast a ballot.
Sources:
youtube.com, thehill.com, politico.com, yahoo.com
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