In the latest Sacha Baron Cohen satirical comedy, El Paso Republican Party Chair Michael Aboud is shown abducting a pregnant woman, watching her get drugged, kidnapping her newborn child and then dropping it from a drone while being told to “kill it.”
In the movie, Aboud participates in what he is told is an anti-terrorism training led by a character played by Cohen, then joins a mission involving the abduction of the pregnant woman and the attempted smuggling of her newborn baby to Mexico to keep the baby from becoming a U.S. citizen. Text on the screen says Aboud and another participant were not aware that the incident was a hoax.
In a text response to El Paso Matters on Wednesday, Aboud said, “no, I don’t. It was heavily edited” when asked if he knew the kidnapping and dropping the baby from the drone were staged. But in a second text, he added that he hadn’t seen the movie and didn’t know “the premise or the scenes.”
In the climactic scene, the baby is said to be in a tote suspended from a drone. Aboud is handed the drone’s remote, told its battery is dying and that the baby won’t make it to Mexico. He’s ordered to drop the baby “to save the white race” in order to prevent it from touching U.S. soil. He does so.
The baby is a prop and the scenario fictional – and as is the case with Cohen’s other comedies, Aboud has said he was not in on the joke. He has threatened to sue Cohen, as first reported by The Guardian news organization, but has not publicly discussed the apparent felonies he’s portrayed as committing in the movie.
In a follow-up text exchange Thursday, Aboud said “there was never a baby so for you to (think) or imply there was is very bad journalism.” He also texted that he didn’t know why El Paso Matters was doing a story about “some stupid comedy when election day is so close. You should be talking to candidates.”
He didn’t respond when asked to clarify whether or not he knew the scenario was fake and the baby a prop.
The mockumentary “Ali G: Who Is I?” – written and directed by Cohen and distributed by Amazon MGM Studios – made a limited theater debut last weekend and became available on Prime Video on Wednesday.
In his Wednesday text, Aboud told El Paso Matters that Cohen and his team are “great at misleading people. They’d said they were doing a documentary about the mass illegal border crossings. They never mentioned Cohen had anything to do with it.”
Last week, he told the El Paso Times that he had received an email “that seemed official” from a production company in summer 2025 inviting him to participate in a gathering in California focused on immigration and its impact on communities.
In a video clip posted to the Howard Stern Show’s Instagram account on Oct. 20, Cohen talked about the baby scene, saying it set out to find out whether one can turn someone who is rational into a “murderer” within a few hours.
“And did it?” Stern asked. “Yeah,” Cohen replied.
Aboud did not respond to requests for comment on Cohen’s interview on the popular radio talk show.
The Texas Republican Party did not respond to requests for comment about Aboud’s appearance in the film and his actions in it.
An Army veteran, Aboud served as a Republican precinct chair in 2021. He was first elected as Republican county chair in 2025 to fill an unexpired term, and was reelected to the position with 56% of the vote in the March primary, defeating two other candidates. County party chairs serve two years starting soon after the March primaries.
The party chair position is unpaid, although the party receives funds to administer its elections, including accepting filings and submitting names for election judges and early voting ballot boards.
The Texas Election Code does not provide a code of personal conduct or set out other reasons for removal of a county party chair other than for “abandonment of office” if they fail to perform their statutory duties or fail to attend four or more meetings of the county executive committee, the party’s governing body,
‘Save the white race’
The Guardian reported that until it contacted Aboud last week, he was “unaware of his participation in anything other than what he believed to be a nonfiction film.” The outlet said Aboud declined to comment when pressed further about his actions in the movie.
The 90-minute, R-rated “Ali G” comedy features Cohen as several characters, including the movie’s namesake, white wannabe rapper Ali G, as well as an Israeli terror expert, Colonel Erran Morad.
In the movie, Aboud is one of nine men who take part in anti-terrorism training and introduces himself as the Republican party chair in El Paso.
“We’ve seen a lot of the illegal immigrants coming through, there’s a huge amount of terrorism, gangs are hanging people from their overpasses – way too often,” he says.
In the middle of the training, another character played by Cohen enters the scene: Richard Edmonds, the field director from “California Immigration Control,” a nonexistent agency. Edmonds tells the group that Ali G is really Alejandro Gonzalez – a “Latin X drug lord” from El Salvador’s “deadliest cartel.”
Edmonds says the gang’s name is Los Chicos del Callejón – the Backstreet Boys.
Ali G has fathered more than 140,000 children, the men are told, and if his pregnant girlfriend Julia gives birth in the United States, the child will become an “anchor baby.” Then those thousands of other children could become citizens, the men are told.
Edmonds then gives the men a mission: to stop Julia from giving birth in the United States.
Aboud is one of two picked – and who agree – to go undercover as ambulance workers, kidnap Julia and transport her and the unborn baby to Mexico so she can give birth there instead.
Aboud and the second man picked for the mission fist bump.
Dressed as an ambulance worker, Aboud and others arrive in a fake ambulance to kidnap Julia, who’s in labor. Julia gives birth – to a fake baby in a fake hospital – while Aboud reluctantly holds her hand. He’s splattered with fake blood.
The baby is taken from Julia, who is drugged with a needle to the neck as Aboud and others watch. She’s left behind as the baby is driven in the ambulance to a remote area. The baby is to be put in a tote bag hooked to a drone to be flown into Mexico, Morad tells the men.
Aboud clears his throat and sighs, appearing unsure of the task, but then helps hook the bag to the drone. Morad high-fives him. Aboud watches through binoculars as the drone carries the baby away, and amid some chaos, is handed the drone’s remote, which is supposedly losing power as the baby is lifted high in the air.
Aboud appears unsure of how he ended up with the remote and what to do with it. Morad then says that If the baby lands in the United States, it will become a citizen.
“Release the baby! Release the baby!” Morad shouts. “Soldier Michael, save the white race and kill the baby! Drop the baby!”
Aboud appears to struggle to figure out how, but then pushes a button that drops the baby from the drone. Ali G appears just in time to catch the baby, then Julia appears and is reunited with the newborn.
It’s unclear exactly what Aboud heard or saw during the filming – or what kind of editing went into the movie.
In one of the last scenes, Ali G is shown telling the baby, now about a year old, his birth story. Turns out, he says, immigration enforcement officials were misinformed and had mistaken him for the Latino gangster.
What satire exposes, according to Cohen
Cohen is perhaps most known for his 2006 mockumentary, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.”
In an Oct. 20 essay in Time Magazine, Cohen talked about satire, writing that each of his characters have “a specific mechanism to encourage people to drop their guards and show what they really believe, prejudices and all.”
“I’ve always designed my characters and comedy as vehicles to expose prejudice, bias, and stupidity, though I realize not everyone sees them that way,” he wrote.
In the “Ali G” movie, he said, he “exposes Islamophobia and the ludicrous things people will do when they’re gripped by an irrational fear of ‘the other.’”
The movie has not been well-received by critics, with one calling it a “stunning career crash” and many others saying it’s appalling and unfunny.
The entertainment publication Deadline calls it outrageous, though chief film critic Pete Hammond wrote that “this kind of comedy is actually a public service, so I hope he doesn’t give it up just when it is needed most to savagely show how mad mad mad mad this world has become.”
The post In Sacha Baron Cohen satire, El Paso GOP chair kidnaps pregnant woman, abducts and drops newborn from drone to ‘save the white race’ appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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