Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed confirmed Saturday night that his sister-in-law, Mariam Jukaku, was a plaintiff in a 2016 federal lawsuit over her alleged placement on the government’s terrorist watchlist, officially called the Terrorism Screening Database.
Fox News senior correspondent Mike Tobin pressed El-Sayed directly on court documents naming Jukaku in the suit. “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 asked. El-Sayed answered, “Yeah.”
El-Sayed went on to defend Jukaku and pivot his criticism to Republican opponent Mike Rogers.
“She did nothing wrong and was captured on that and then sued and got off,” El-Sayed said. “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.”
The confirmation lands days ahead of former President Barack Obama’s scheduled campaign appearance with El-Sayed in Michigan on Oct. 24, with the Nov. 3 midterm election approaching.
According to the 2016 complaint, Jukaku underwent extra airport screening in 2012 and said she was never told why she had been flagged. The filing stated she was believed removed from the watchlist by 2016.
El-Sayed said she sued and won. The record shows otherwise: a federal appeals court overturned a ruling that had favored the plaintiffs in 2021, and a separate lawsuit seeking damages was dismissed in 2017.
The FBI would not confirm or deny Jukaku’s watchlist status when asked by Fox News. “It is the U.S. government’s policy to neither confirm nor deny a person’s inclusion in the Terrorist Screening Dataset, commonly known as the terrorist watchlist,” the agency said.
The exchange follows a separate round of allegations concerning purported Muslim Brotherhood ties to El-Sayed’s family, which his campaign has called “racist and untrue.” Rogers called those allegations “disqualifying” on Saturday.
Neither the lawsuit nor its outcome establishes wrongdoing by Jukaku or by El-Sayed.
