Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Barack Obama is preparing to campaign for far-left Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

Obama is scheduled to appear alongside El-Sayed in Detroit on October 24 as Democrats battle to retain the Michigan Senate seat against Republican Mike Rogers.

🚨 Abdul El-Sayed announces that Barack Obama will join him on the campaign trail.

He is running on Medicare for All and taxing the rich. pic.twitter.com/21e7EOLoXc

— Democrats Deliver (@DemzDeliver) October 5, 2026

However, court records indicate El-Sayed’s sister-in-law previously sued the federal government over her alleged inclusion on a terrorism watchlist during Obama’s presidency.

Mariam Jukaku, the sister of El-Sayed’s wife, Sarah, participated in two federal lawsuits back in 2016 challenging her placement on the government’s Terrorist Screening Database.

The lawsuits were brought with assistance from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization that supports those with ties to Islamism.

CAIR-MI Files Class Action Lawsuit Challenging Terror Watch Lists https://t.co/PwD7AS0elf pic.twitter.com/BUC9cPCq1A

— CAIR-MI (@CAIRMI) April 6, 2016

According to court filings, Jukaku began experiencing difficulties in 2012 after receiving a boarding pass marked with the designation “SSSS,” which triggers additional airport security screening.

She subsequently underwent extensive searches and questioned why she had been subjected to heightened scrutiny.

One lawsuit sought to challenge the alleged watchlist designation on constitutional grounds, while another pursued financial damages.

The litigation concluded without establishing that the government had improperly placed Jukaku on the database.

The FBI has also declined to confirm whether she was ever included on the watchlist, citing its longstanding policy of neither confirming nor denying individual designations.

Jukaku previously served as a leader of the Muslim Student Association at the University of California, Los Angeles, and edited its Muslim student publication, Al-Talib.

In 2004, she publicly rejected allegations concerning the student organization’s supposed connections to extremist groups.

“They were ridiculous allegations that didn’t make sense,” she told UCLA’s Daily Bruin at the time.

The controversy has also drawn attention to El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, who previously served as president of CAIR’s Michigan chapter.

According to The Midwesterner, Tayeb Jukaku has contributed at least $300,000 to a political action committee supporting El-Sayed’s Senate campaign.

Meanwhile, El-Sayed has faced separate questions about his family’s historical connections to the Muslim Brotherhood after social media posts by his half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, resurfaced.

In a 2012 post, Abdelhadi boasted about her mother’s activism for the organization, which seeks to establish an international Islamic caliphate.

The restoration of an international Islamic caliphate is the explicit objective in the Muslim Brotherhood’s founding ideology. https://t.co/qmee2iN4Dy

— Ben Kew (@ben_kew) October 13, 2026

Latest polling data from RealClearPolling shows that El-Sayed has a lead of around one percent over his opponent, well within the margin of error.