Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has a bit of a family story problem. His half-sister, University of Chicago professor Eman Abdelhadi, wrote in a 2016 essay that federal agents had searched the home she shared with their mother, according to the Washington Free Beacon. That’s a tough one to explain away.
El-Sayed gave it his best shot during Wednesday’s final debate against Republican Mike Rogers. When Rogers pressed him on his family’s background, El-Sayed suggested the FBI scrutiny happened because his mother was, quote, “a nurse in Missouri.” Nurses do get raided all the time, right? Happens constantly. Nothing to see here.
The thing is, their mother, Fatten Elkomy, worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency, a Missouri-based charity, from 1999 through at least 2004. Federal agents raided that charity’s offices in October 2004, the same month the Treasury Department designated its global network as a terrorism supporter, citing financial support for Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and Hamas.
Elkomy was never charged, and that matters. But court records from the government’s later prosecution referenced her more than a dozen times, including her role in wire transfers and a request to send more than $24,000 to the charity’s Iraq office. The charity’s executive director and a board member later pleaded guilty to illegally moving money to Iraq in violation of U.S. sanctions, and IARA itself admitted in 2016 to funneling roughly $1.4 million there.
In a separate 2024 essay, Abdelhadi wrote that as a teenager she watched her mother sort through the family’s belongings for anything that might be misread during a raid, and that her mother periodically fielded calls from the FBI. So we’ve got two essays now, years apart, painting a pretty detailed picture that goes well beyond “she was just a nurse.”
Rogers has also pressed El-Sayed on Abdelhadi’s 2012 social media posts describing their mother’s activism in the Muslim Brotherhood as a college student in Egypt in the 1970s. El-Sayed has denied that he or his family have any ties to the Brotherhood and told NBC News he had never even discussed the subject with his mother. He has said his parents divorced when he was 3 and that he was raised by his father and stepmother. His campaign has previously said Elkomy’s work at the charity involved helping orphaned children.
El-Sayed’s campaign did not immediately respond a request for comment, which is the political equivalent of hiding under a blanket and hoping everyone forgets you’re there. Rogers will keep pressing, Michigan voters are paying attention, and El-Sayed is going to need a better answer than “she was a nurse.”
