Michigan Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed confirmed on Saturday that his sister-in-law Mariam Jukaku landed on the terrorist watch list when former President Barack Obama was still in the White House.
El-Sayed, who is scheduled to campaign alongside Obama in the coming days, told Fox News senior correspondent Mike Tobin that Jukaku’s name had been added to the federal Terrorist Screening Dataset — which is more commonly referred to as “the Watchlist” — and had pursued legal avenues to have her name removed.
“There’s reporting in a lawsuit that now backs it up. And documentation with the lawsuit that Mariam Jukaku, who’s your sister-in-law, that she was on the terrorist watch list?” Tobin prompted.
“Yeah,” El-Sayed said she had been added to the list, but then argued that she’d never done anything to warrant her placement there — and claimed that the system operated on a “guilty-until-proven-innocent” philosophy when the names on the list tilted in certain ethnic directions.
“She did nothing wrong and was captured on that and then sued and got off. You’ve got this system where folks are guilty until proven innocent because they’ve got different kinds of names, because of the infrastructure that people like Mike Rogers set up,” he said, trying to tie the issue to his opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI).
Jukaku’s complaint, filed in 2016, alleges that she was selected for additional screening at an airport, but was not told why the extra scrutiny was deemed necessary. She said at the time of the filing that she believes she was removed from the list by 2016.
El-Sayed claimed that she “sued and got off” from the lawsuit, but Fox News Digital reported that the ruling favoring the plaintiffs was overturned in 2021 — and a companion lawsuit from 2017, in which the plaintiffs sought damages, was dismissed.
El-Sayed has been on his back foot for much of the campaign as his association with radical pro-communist streamer Hasan Piker has raised red flags — and his apparent inability to take a firm stance disavowing the Muslim Brotherhood.
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