Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is running ads touting his family's heartland roots, but a profile of his half-sister reveals a record of anti-police extremism, anti-capitalist activism, and a felony arrest at an anti-ICE protest.
Eman Abdelhadi, a University of Chicago professor and El-Sayed's maternal half-sister, was arrested in October 2025 and charged with felony aggravated battery after prosecutors said she "knowingly and intentionally" spit on an Illinois state trooper during a protest outside an immigrant processing and detention center in Broadview, Illinois. The Washington Free Beacon reported on Abdelhadi's political views, arrest record, and relationship to the candidate in a profile published July 21, 2026, just as El-Sayed launched a new ad campaign highlighting his family's "roots in mid-Michigan."
El-Sayed, a left-wing Democrat running to unseat Congresswoman Haley Stevens in a primary, did not respond to the Free Beacon's request for comment. He has not mentioned Abdelhadi on social media or on the campaign trail. His ads instead feature his step-grandparents, Judy and Jan Johnson, praising his work as Wayne County's former health director.
Abdelhadi, born in 1989, is a self-described "queer Muslim activist" who teaches in the University of Chicago's Department of Comparative Human Development. Her social media posts, interviews, and published work paint a picture of someone far to the left of even the progressive wing El-Sayed courts, and raise questions about how much ideological distance actually separates the two siblings.
Abdelhadi co-authored a novel titled Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune with M.E. O'Brien, whom she calls her "bestie" and whom the Free Beacon describes as a "trans communist." Abdelhadi called the book a "funky, commie, queer novel" and "very much a theory book in disguise." The novel depicts a fictionalized New York in which police are abolished, the nuclear family is replaced by "caretaking relationships within the commune," and the Middle East is reshaped by a "Final Intifada" that destroys Israel.
Abdelhadi even wrote herself into the story as a character who helps rioters storm the campus of her "former employer", the University of Chicago. O'Brien, her coauthor, separately published a 2023 book through Pluto Books titled Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care.
In an August 2024 post on X, Abdelhadi put the book's thesis plainly: "I wrote an entire novel about transitioning out of capitalism to a stateless, communized society." Another post declared: "I'm over capitalism, over wage slavery. Over it."
In a 2024 interview with Vox, she framed the project in revolutionary terms:
"It would be really painful if the state and the market fell. But is there a future beyond them that might be even better?... We really wanted to imagine a plausible near-future that people could place themselves in and place themselves as the heroes of a revolution and as the inheritors of a better world."
El-Sayed, for his part, has told voters he is "not somebody who is a socialist" and "just believes that capitalism has to be regulated." But that claim sits uneasily beside his record of headlining events for the Democratic Socialists of America and raising money for socialist candidates, a pattern that predates his Senate run.
Abdelhadi's hostility toward law enforcement is not theoretical. In June 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, she posted on X calling to "abolish the police." A separate post read: "Good morning, jummuah mubarak and f*** the police."
That same summer, El-Sayed himself said publicly, "We do need to defund the police." The sibling positions differed in degree, Abdelhadi wanted abolition, El-Sayed wanted defunding, but pointed in the same direction.
Then came October 2025. Abdelhadi joined a protest outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois. Prosecutors charged her with felony aggravated battery, alleging she deliberately spit on a state trooper. Cook County issued her mugshot. The University of Chicago, already dealing with Abdelhadi's public denunciations of the school, announced an investigation into her conduct.
Abdelhadi had previously condemned her own employer in blunt terms. In one interview, she said: "Like, f*** the University of Chicago, it's evil. Like, you know?" She labeled the university a "colonial landlord" and a "police force." The school's decision to investigate her followed those remarks.
Abdelhadi's views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict run through her academic work, her fiction, and her social media. On October 7, 2023, the day Hamas attacked Israel, Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted calling the assault "horrifying." Abdelhadi responded on X with open disappointment:
"What a disappointment. If you can't stand with a ppl that have been held in an open prison for 16 years finally fighting their oppressors, how can you claim to stand for justice?"
When Sanders later pledged in July 2024 to "do all that I can to see that President Biden is re-elected," Abdelhadi again registered her disgust: "The level of disappointment. Hard to believe I still had a Bernie 2020 sticker in my office less than a year ago."
Sanders, a self-described socialist, was not left-wing enough for Abdelhadi. She also told the Washington Post in late October 2023 that the Biden White House's support for Israel "destroyed 20-years... worth of good will with Muslims and Arabs in just 2 weeks, losing an entire generation that was raised in the progressive coalition, possibly forever."
El-Sayed operated in the same political current during the 2024 Michigan presidential primary, joining the "uncommitted" movement that pushed Democrats to vote against Biden over what El-Sayed called "his disaster in Gaza." His campaign has also drawn scrutiny for accepting an endorsement from an Arab-American PAC whose leader called Hamas "freedom fighters."
Abdelhadi's public commentary extends well beyond campus activism. In September 2021, she appeared on CGTN, the Chinese government's English-language television network, to discuss the impact of the September 11 attacks on Muslim Americans. She told the state-run outlet that "right-wing politicians and others... sort of compete with each other to see who can be more xenophobic towards Muslims," and said the pattern "just reflects a broader culture of xenophobia and white supremacy in this country."
She made similar claims in a 2023 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, asserting that "anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiments are 'deeply rooted' in American culture." In a 2016 piece, she argued that U.S. politicians exploit "women's oppression in Muslim societies to justify American intervention," writing that "treating gender inequality as a problem unique to the Muslim world" helped "the Right escape accountability for women's oppression within the United States" and "lent their profit-driven imperialism a moral weight."
El-Sayed's own record on post-9/11 politics raises its own questions. In a September 2012 article published on CNN's Global Public Square blog, he argued that "discrimination and marginalization" of American Muslims after the attacks led to "ethnicity-related stress" that produced measurable health consequences, including higher rates of premature and low birth weight babies. He did not mention a 2008 study he coauthored that found "no difference" in those same rates among Muslim mothers before and after September 11.
El-Sayed also identified himself as a citizen of both the United States and Egypt on his academic résumé. His campaign later told the Free Beacon he had been "told as a child that his grandfather had pursued Egyptian citizenship on his behalf" but was "unable to find any documentation to verify this claim." The candidate has previously called American politics a "disease" while campaigning alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders.
The contrast between El-Sayed's campaign messaging and his family's actual political orbit is stark. His latest ads lean heavily on his step-grandparents and his "roots in mid-Michigan." Abdelhadi, meanwhile, posted on X that she was "a proud little sister" when El-Sayed launched his campaign.
Abdelhadi's mother, Fatten Fathy Mohamed, is from Egypt. Her father, Tawfik Abdelhadi, is from Palestine. Mohamed was previously married to El-Sayed's father, Mohamed El-Sayed; the two divorced in 1988, and both remarried within months. Abdelhadi was born the following year. She has said she spent her early childhood in Egypt and briefly in Saudi Arabia. The half-siblings share a mother and, by Abdelhadi's own account, a political sensibility, even if El-Sayed packages his more carefully for Michigan voters.
El-Sayed's record of contradictions between his public positioning and his actual associations is by now well-documented. He has called doctors who reject Medicaid racist while his own wife's practice does not accept it. His campaign finances have drawn scrutiny over his father-in-law's role bankrolling his super PAC while leading organizations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Abdelhadi did not respond to the Free Beacon's inquiry. Her University of Chicago email auto-reply stated she was "traveling abroad" between July 18 and August 5. El-Sayed's campaign also did not comment. The winner of the Democratic primary will face Republican nominee Mike Rogers in November's general election for the Michigan Senate seat.
Voters can judge a candidate by the company he keeps, and by the company he hides.
