Unearthed Video Exposes El-Sayed’s Opinion on Driver’s Licenses for Illegal Immigrants

Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate for US Senate in Michigan, once proposed allowing undocumented immigrants to secure driver’s licenses, making the case that not doing so would be discriminatory.

“We’ve got to make sure that in this state we are not discriminating against documentation status. Right now, if you’re undocumented, you don’t get access to a driver’s license. You’re stuck,” El-Sayed said in a 2018 campaign interview.

At the time, El-Sayed was running for governor.

Eight years later, as he looks to join the US Senate, the resurfaced clip sheds light on El-Sayed’s past thinking about how local governments should interact with illegal aliens and raises questions about whether granting them state identification would in some ways legitimize their presence in the US.

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In the 2018 clip, El-Sayed seemed concerned that illegal aliens would be ineligible for some of those advantages.

“You don’t get access to a lot of the basic things that the state offers everybody else, and I think that’s ridiculous and so we’ve got to stop discriminating that way,” El-Sayed said.

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