As an assistant professor at Columbia University, Abdul El-Sayed said he held dual U.S.-Egyptian citizenship. El-Sayed is now running for a Michigan Senate seat, and his campaign says that was a mistake—he’s not an Egyptian citizen and never has been.
El-Sayed was born in Michigan to Egyptian émigrés. He graduated from Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 2014 and joined Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health the same year. Around that time, El-Sayed published his résumé on an academic networking site. It lists his “citizenships” as “USA, Egypt.” El-Sayed’s résumé was removed from the site he published it to, Academia, after the Washington Free Beacon sent it to the campaign.
That was then, this is now. “Abdul is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been,” campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner told the Free Beacon. She said that the physician 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,” but that his unnamed informant was wrong.
“When he tried to verify this later on in life,” Richner said, “he and his family were unable to find any documentation to verify this claim.” Richner did not respond to a request for comment on when and how El-Sayed determined that he is not, in fact, an Egyptian citizen.
The Democrat, who has likened state ballot measures barring courts from considering Sharia and international law to the Trail of Tears, has evoked his father’s immigrant journey in campaign speeches. “My dad, Muhammad, he took a bet on a country, this country, back in 1978,” El-Sayed said during a September rally. He has also recounted traveling to Egypt to visit family as a child.
The campaign’s explanation suggests that, at best, El-Sayed claimed Egyptian citizenship on his CV at the age of 30 without verifying the accuracy of the claim. There is reason to believe, however, that El-Sayed would have known he was not a dual national by the time he was teaching at Columbia.
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.”
El-Sayed is not the first Democratic Senate candidate to list a false ethnicity or nationality on an academic résumé only to blame the lie on a family member’s embellishment.
Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) came under fire during her 2012 campaign for describing herself as a Native American. Warren said at the time that her mother, grandparents, and aunts and uncles “often talked about our family’s Native American heritage” and she “never thought to ask them for documentation.”
That did not “change the fact that it is a part of who I am,” she insisted. Warren ultimately apologized to the Cherokee Nation when a DNA test indicated she is as little as 1/1,024 Native American.
The Native American claim helped Warren, a white woman, stand out in the competitive world of Ivy League academia. Harvard Law School, for example, touted her as its “first woman of color.”
El-Sayed’s CV states that it was last updated in October of 2013—when El-Sayed was completing his medical degree—though it includes more recent events, including his May 2014 graduation from Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and subsequent start as an assistant professor at the Ivy League school, suggesting it was updated more recently. Copies of his CV from 2012 and 2016 do not include any citizenship information.
During the time he claimed to have Egyptian citizenship, El-Sayed was hired as an “Assistant Professor (Tenure Track)” at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, according to his CV. He was hired the same month he graduated from Columbia’s medical school, in May 2014.
Prior to this, El-Sayed was working as a post-doctoral researcher at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.
El-Sayed taught at Columbia until 2015, when he moved back to Detroit, where he was born, to serve as the city’s health officer. He resigned from the job in 2017 to launch an unsuccessful run for governor before emerging as a left-wing activist. As the Black Lives Matter movement exploded in 2020, El-Sayed served on the board of two far-left groups that called to defund police, the Free Beacon reported. He also served as a national surrogate for Bernie Sanders’s (I., Vt.) 2020 campaign.
El-Sayed has sought to distance himself from his far-left background as he runs to defeat state senator Mallory McMorrow and Rep. Haley Stevens in a crowded Democratic primary race. He deleted dozens of social media posts denouncing law enforcement, including one in which he expressed support for the “#Defund movement.” El-Sayed now says he “actually never, never called for defunding.”
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