"Including My Own": Abdul El-Sayed’s Half-Sister Wrote That the FBI Searched Their Mother’s Home

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The half-sister of Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed wrote in 2016 that federal agents had searched the home she shared with their mother, according to a Washington Free Beacon report published Saturday.

Eman Abdelhadi, a professor at the University of Chicago, made the remark in an essay about a New York vigil for victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting. In it, she recalled the FBI raiding mosques, Muslim charities and homes, “including my own.” The essay did not say when the search took place.

Their mother, Fatten Elkomy, worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA), a Missouri-based charity, from 1999 through at least 2004, according to court records. Federal agents raided the 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. However, exhibits in 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 go through the family’s belongings for anything that might be misread during a raid, and that her mother periodically took calls from the FBI.

The revelation comes days after El-Sayed suggested during Wednesday’s final debate against Republican Mike Rogers that the attacks on him stemmed from his mother being “a nurse in Missouri.” Rogers has pressed El-Sayed over both the IARA employment and Abdelhadi’s 2012 social media posts describing their mother’s activism in the Muslim Brotherhood as a college student in Egypt during the 1970s.

El-Sayed has denied that he or his family have any ties to the Brotherhood and told NBC News he had never 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, and it did not immediately respond to a request for comment.