What Abdul El-Sayed says on the campaign trail tells you one story. What he has said when the stakes seemed lower tells you a very different one.
El-Sayed is the Democrat nominee for Michigan's open Senate seat, running on a platform of social justice and progressive healthcare policy, backed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. What his campaign brochure leaves out is more instructive than anything in it.
Start with the latest revelation. During El-Sayed's tenure as Detroit's Health Director from 2015 to 2017, nearly 4,680 dogs and cats were euthanized at Detroit Animal Care and Control — a facility that fell under his department. In 2015 alone, the shelter killed 1,988 dogs and 272 cats, accounting for more than a quarter of every dog put down in the county that year. A whistleblower lawsuit filed by former animal control officer Brittany Roberts alleged that animals were kept in filthy conditions, deprived of adequate food and medical care, and that some died from neglect before they ever reached the euthanasia table.
El-Sayed has not addressed it.
The pet massacre is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern.
In 2009, El-Sayed gave an interview to the New York Times while purchasing his first home in Ann Arbor. Asked about his decision to use a Sharia-compliant mortgage, he said: "When I die and I stand before God and go through everything I did in my life, I don't want to say I did it the easy way instead of the Shariah-compliant way. Not because of fear but because of obligation."
His word for it: obligation. A sacred duty to follow Sharia law — a legal system rooted in Islamic religious texts — until the day he dies.
When that quote resurfaced during his 2018 gubernatorial campaign, El-Sayed denied he had ever described himself as Sharia-compliant. The 2009 interview was still there.
When the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei died, El-Sayed was asked for a response. His answer: "I also want to remind you guys that there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today. So, like, I just don't want to comment on Khamenei at all." No comment on the man who led the world's foremost state sponsor of terrorism.
Then there is the rest of the record. El-Sayed told an interviewer in 2020, "I believe we do need to defund the police." When confronted with that statement during his Senate campaign, he denied saying it. CNN found the audio. He wants to abolish ICE, give illegal immigrants driver's licenses and welfare benefits, and cut off all military aid to Israel. He refused to affirm Israel's right to exist during a CNN interview this cycle. He declined to disavow radical Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, whose past statements have been widely condemned even within his own party.
Michigan voters deserve to know exactly who they are being asked to send to Washington.