Abdul El-Sayed Ran a ‘Dog Slaughterhouse’ and the Swamp Wants You to Thank Him for It

By Buck Buckhorn · August 14, 2026

Opinion

Here is how the establishment mind works. A man runs a city department where animals died in their cages, where a whistleblower called the place a “slaughterhouse,” where a federal judge had to step in to stop them from snatching dogs off the street without a warrant. And the story you are supposed to believe is that he is a hero because the numbers got slightly less catastrophic on his watch.

Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed wants you to send him to Washington. Before that, he ran Detroit’s Health Department, which in October 2015 absorbed the city’s Animal Care and Control operation from the police department. What followed was, by any honest reading, a disaster. The Daily Mail obtained records showing 4,680 dogs and cats were euthanized during the period surrounding El-Sayed’s tenure. In the first full calendar year under his watch, 1,056 dogs and 29 cats were killed.

Then there is Brittany Roberts. She was an animal control officer who started in March 2015 and filed a whistleblower lawsuit that October alleging animals died from lack of food and medical care, were kept in filthy conditions, and were subjected to systematic mistreatment. “Every morning, we’d just walk around and see who was alive before we could even feed,” she said in 2015. She called the place a slaughterhouse. Detroit settled her lawsuit for $63,000 in July 2016. Ask yourself: when was the last time a city paid sixty-three grand to settle a claim that was completely baseless?

But here comes the spin. El-Sayed’s campaign wants you to focus on the live-release rate, which climbed from roughly 20 to 26 percent when he inherited the operation to about 61 to 62 percent by late 2016. They point to a new shelter director, a bigger facility, partnerships with rescue groups. And look, maybe some of that is real. Maybe things did improve. But funny how the improvement narrative always comes wrapped around a pile of dead animals and a cash settlement to the woman who tried to sound the alarm.

Detroit's Health Department absorbed the city's Animal Care and Control operation.

Even Jill Biden’s former press secretary, Michael LaRosa, could not swallow it. “I actually really really don’t want to believe this,” he wrote on social media. “Can someone verify?” When a Biden-world operative is publicly hoping your story is fake, you have a problem that no campaign memo can fix.

El-Sayed’s own words are the most damning. In a 2024 podcast interview, he admitted he “inherited a part of the job that I never trained for and never thought I would do.” So the city handed an animal control operation in crisis to a man who had no training for it and no expectation of doing it. Who made that call? Who decided that the Health Department, under a director with zero animal welfare experience, was the right home for a shelter where dogs were dying in cages? Follow that question and you will find the real story.

Republican Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s opponent, is running with it. “This is sickening,” he wrote. “Meanwhile, Detroiters couldn’t even trust him with their pets.” That line is going to stick because it is true.

The establishment will tell you this is a hit job. They will say the numbers are being taken out of context. They will say the live-release rate improved. They will say he inherited a mess. And every word of that might be accurate. But here is what they cannot spin away: a woman who worked inside that shelter called it a slaughterhouse, a federal judge had to restrain the operation, and the city cut her a check to make the lawsuit go away. That is not a hit job. That is a record.

Now ask yourself who benefits from sending a man with that record to the United States Senate. Because it is not the little guy. It is never the little guy.

Sources