Mariam Odeh was a known anti-Israel campus agitator before joining El-Sayed’s campaign
A former staffer for Abdul El-Sayed, the left-wing Democratic candidate for Michigan’s open Senate seat, was among the eight individuals the Justice Department indicted Wednesday for allegedly engaging in a “coordinated campaign” to threaten Jewish officials, businesses, and groups at the University of Michigan.
Dearborn, Mich., native Mariam Odeh, 24, faces one count of conspiracy to transmit threats in interstate and foreign commerce after participating in anti-Israel disruptions and vandalism on campus aimed at pressuring the university to divest from the Jewish state following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre. A pre-trial services officer told the judge that the recent graduate reported “full-time employment for about four months for a local Senate candidate,” the Detroit News reported.
El-Sayed’s campaign confirmed to the outlet that it employed Odeh, initially claiming she only worked for it for two weeks. A campaign spokeswoman later said she was actually hired on an hourly basis in February and stayed on through mid-April.
Her employment with the El-Sayed campaign is just the latest instance tying the left-wing Democrat to pro-Hamas agitators. In April, he rallied with Hasan Piker, an influencer who said “America deserved 9/11” and has defended Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. El-Sayed also said during a private campaign meeting that he didn’t want to make a statement on the death of former Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei because many voters in Dearborn were “sad” about the dictator’s assassination. An audio recording of the meeting was first published by the Washington Free Beacon.
Odeh and her fellow defendants “damaged and defaced homes and businesses with spray-painted messages, threats, and symbols” like “INTIFADA” and “discussed methods by which to harm the targets and their families, including poison, bombs, and psychological torture,” according to the indictment.
“In the dead of night, masked and hooded defendants allegedly threw noxious chemicals through the windows of families’ homes and taped demand letters to their front doors,” Jennifer Runyan, the special agent in charge of the FBI Detroit Field Office, added. “At every step they attempted to cover their tracks and delete evidence of their crimes.”
Those charged allegedly collected “personal addresses, photographs, political and social connections, business ownership, and other personal details of the targets.”
Odeh had been known for her activism early on in her time at Michigan, having been an awardee of the Arab America Foundation’s 20 Under 20 in 2020 initiative during her freshman year. “The awardees are under the age of 20, excel in their studies, work actively in their communities to help their peers, and demonstrate a commitment to their Arab heritage,” the foundation wrote of the recipients. It notes that Odeh, a Palestinian American, was given the Brehm Scholarship, a “four-year undergraduate scholarship” covering “full resident tuition.”
The indictment also identifies her as president of Students Allied for Freedom and Equality at Ann Arbor. In March 2025, she spoke at a protest outside University of Michigan president Santa Ono’s house, calling on the school to divest from companies tied to Israel.
“The war machine has once again flooded our screens with unbearable images: children wrapped in white shrouds, parents screaming in agony, entire families wiped out in an instant,” the Michigan Daily quoted Odeh saying. “We have stood witness time and time again as journalists have went and given their lives to document and broadcast these horrors.”
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