Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) accused Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, of having links to the Muslim Brotherhood during a hearing of a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
“Just yesterday, Abdul El-Sayed, the son-in-law of a leading member of several Brotherhood groups, won Michigan’s Democrat primary for U.S. Senate,” Cruz said. “Behind El-Sayed’s political rise sits a much older and more entrenched institutional network.”
One of the witnesses at the hearing, Kyle Shideler, a security analyst at the Center for Security Policy, described the “connections” that El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Dr. Tayeb Jukaku, has to the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other groups that Shideler said were “Brotherhood-linked.”
“This includes being the president at one time of CAIR Michigan,” Shideler said, of Jukaku. “Also his presence on the Islamic Society of North America’s founders committee, which is only for those most exclusively devoted to ISNA to provide significant amounts of funding.”
“There are other known Brotherhood members on that committee,” Shideler said.
Jukaku is a kidney specialist in Detroit who is listed on the board of directors of CAIR Michigan. His biography on the website of the ISNA founder’s committee says that he joined the group, because it helped his “whole family in the formative years of our lives as Muslims” in the United States after he emigrated from India.
CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 criminal case against the Holy Land Foundation, in which the charged defendants were found guilty of providing support to Hamas and other related terrorism financing charges. CAIR bills itself as “America’s largest Muslim civil liberties organization,” and the group has never been charged with a crime.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 as a pan-Islamist revival movement and established or inspired branches and affiliates across the Middle East, including Hamas.
In January, the U.S. Treasury Department designated the Egyptian and Jordanian branches of the Brotherhood as terrorist organizations. The group as a whole has never never been outlawed as a foreign terror group in the United States.
Cruz led Wednesday’s hearing, titled “Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America,” as chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights.Democrats on the subcommittee boycotted Wednesday’s hearing, which they said targeted the entire American Muslim community.
“Democrats have no intention of indulging this political creepshow, particularly after the recent violence targeting places of faith,” stated Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.).
They cited media reports that Texas Republicans have focused on combatting “radical Islam” as a campaign strategy in the 2026 elections, including Republican-led efforts to halt the creation of an Islamic residential center in East Plano, Texas.
Cruz was the only senator from either party to appear at Wednesday’s hearing.
El-Sayed’s associations with the far left, including Islamic groups, are likely to be a focus of the general election for a seat that could decide control of the Senate after a bitter Democratic primary battle, in which El-Sayed’s opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), accused El-Sayed of wanting to “blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans.”
On Wednesday, former congressman Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, implicitly compared his time as chair on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during the raid to kill Osama Bin Laden to El-Sayed’s campaign appearances with the influencer Hasan Piker, who said in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11.”
“I spent my life hunting terrorists,” Rogers wrote, accompanied by a video about the Bin Laden raid.
“I never in a million years thought I’d hear the words, ‘America deserved 9/11,’” he wrote. “But here we are.”
