Tobias Forsythe was 21 years old. A goalkeeper. A college kid with his whole life ahead of him. In July, a truck driver from Uzbekistan who couldn't speak English and had already failed a language proficiency test crossed a median on an Ohio interstate and killed him. The driver had a commercial license anyway.
Remember that as you watch what Abdul El-Sayed had to say about driver's licenses for illegal immigrants.
The Democrat primary hopeful wants Michigan voters to send him to the U.S. Senate. Newly surfaced video shows that his vision for getting there once included blocking local cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and handing driver's licenses to people in the country illegally.
The footage emerged hours before Tuesday’s Democrat Senate primary, where El-Sayed is facing Democrat Rep. Haley Stevens (MI-11). It comes from a July 2018 interview recorded during El-Sayed’s unsuccessful campaign for governor. He did not leave much room for interpretation.
The clip circulated on Twitter/X Monday night. Listen to how fast he pivots from blocking ICE cooperation to calling immigration enforcement a form of discrimination.
Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed promised drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants in unearthed 2018 footage, calling it "discriminatory" to deny them access based on documentation status.
— Fox News Politics (@foxnewspolitics) August 4, 2026
El-Sayed, now running for U.S. Senate as a Democrat, made the comments during his… pic.twitter.com/ayfbFVENwu
“Beyond that, I look forward to pushing forward legislation that would preempt localities from participating with ICE and using their local resources to do the same. Beyond that, we’ve also got to make sure that in this state we are not discriminating by documentation status. Right now, if you’re undocumented, you don’t get access to a driver’s license, so you’re stuck. You don’t get access to a lot of the basic things the state offers everybody else, and I think that’s ridiculous. And so we’ve got to stop discriminating that way.”
The wording matters. El-Sayed didn't argue that licenses would make roads safer or help illegal immigrants get insured. He called it discrimination. Being in the country illegally, in his view, is not a disqualifying fact; it's a protected characteristic. Legal status, in his telling, was the problem. Not theirs. Ours.
Elections expert Hans von Spakovsky put it bluntly:
"Because America does not have a national ID card like the Europeans and other nations, state driver's licenses are a stand-in for that ID card. Issuing driver's licenses to aliens will help them in all the instances where a license is needed, from opening bank accounts to all types of other transactions”
Spakovsky continued:
"The key to getting aliens to self-deport would be to ensure that they cannot rent apartments, open bank accounts and take all of the other steps necessary to live and work in the U.S.," Spakovsky said.
"Providing them driver's licenses is a huge step in allowing them to easily live and work in the United States," he added.
That was El-Sayed's stated principle: that documentation status should never be a barrier to state services. Licenses included. And the body count that followed from exactly that logic is impossible to ignore.
In May, authorities arrested illegal immigrant truck driver Manvir Singh after a semi-truck crash near Lodi, California, killed two people. DHS said Singh entered the country illegally in 2023, was released by the Biden administration, and later allegedly fled the crash scene on foot. ICE lodged an immigration detainer against him.
Forsythe's killer, Uzbek national Bekhzod Asrarov, had an Ohio commercial driver's license despite previously failing an English-language proficiency test. Investigators said he needed Google Translate to communicate with troopers and was later charged with tampering with evidence.
DHS Confirms Illegal Immigrant Trucker in Another Deadly California Crash Entered U.S. Under Biden
A federal audit found that more than 30 states had issued tens of thousands of commercial licenses to ineligible drivers. The Department of Transportation has since moved to require immigration status verification before any CDL is issued.
El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond when asked whether he still supports providing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. It also declined to answer whether issuing those licenses amounts to government approval of their continued presence in the country.
Eight years may have changed his mind. His campaign had a chance to say so.
No answer.
Editor’s Note: We voted for mass deportations, not mass amnesty. Help us continue to fight back against those trying to go against the will of the American people.
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