HOW WOULD YOU FEEL ABOUT ILHAN OMAR BEING DEPORTED?
Bernie Sanders Says No Serious Candidate Wants to Defund Police - But DSA's Own Program Still Points Toward Abolition
Ilhan Omar says Sanders was talking about actual legislation, not every slogan or long-term movement goal. The distinction matters because the socialist movement's official 2026 program still includes positions that many candidates now avoid describing in the same terms.
Bernie Sanders has spent decades trying to move American politics to the left.
Now he is drawing a line between the economic agenda he wants Democrats to embrace and several slogans that became closely associated with the progressive movement after 2020.
During an Aug. 5 appearance on Pod Save America, the Vermont independent was asked about candidates associated with the Democratic Socialists of America who have supported ideas such as abolishing prisons, defunding or abolishing police departments and eliminating national borders.
Sanders rejected the idea that those positions describe serious candidates running today.
"No serious person that I know who is running for office believes in, quote unquote, 'defunding the police,'" Sanders said.
His answer immediately created a problem for Democrats and democratic socialists who spent the years after George Floyd's murder arguing for much more sweeping changes to policing.
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., was asked to explain that contradiction two days later on CNN.
Her answer was narrower than Sanders's.
Omar argued that he was talking about what candidates are actually trying to enact now, rather than every position activists or politicians embraced during the political upheaval of 2020.
That distinction helps explain the exchange.
It does not make the underlying contradiction disappear.
Sanders did not say policing has no serious problems.
He argued that departments need reform, that racism inside law enforcement should be confronted and that police should not automatically be responsible for every mental-health or drug-addiction crisis.
"Do we need police reform? Do we need to get rid of racism within police departments? Absolutely," Sanders said.
He also said some responsibilities now placed on officers could be handled by other professionals.
But his bottom line was clear.
"Nobody I know, you know, believes in defunding the police," he said.
CNN's Kaitlan Collins then put that claim to Omar.
Omar did not simply answer yes or no.
She first returned to Minneapolis and the political crisis that followed Floyd's murder by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.
"For us in Minneapolis, with the murder of George Floyd, we had to have a deeper conversation about what really it looked like for us to address public safety here," Omar said.
"We had a police department that was essentially problematic."
She argued that once the Minneapolis debate became a national political slogan, much of the local context disappeared.
"When that conversation becomes nationalized, then you sort of get the kind of messaging that gets sort of lost in the void," Omar said.
That account is consistent with what happened politically in Minneapolis.
In 2021, voters were asked whether to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety and remove a charter requirement establishing a minimum police staffing level.
Omar supported that ballot initiative.
Minneapolis voters rejected it, with roughly 56% voting no.
The defeat became one of the clearest examples of the political limits of the post-2020 movement to fundamentally restructure policing.
Omar herself had also used much stronger language earlier in that debate.
In 2020, she argued that the Minneapolis Police Department could not simply be reformed and should instead be rebuilt.
Those statements are relevant because Collins was not asking whether Congress currently had a bill named "Defund the Police."
She was asking whether Sanders's sweeping statement accurately described the political movement he has helped lead.
When Collins pressed her again, Omar supplied a narrower test.
"When he says that, I think he's talking about someone putting forth a piece of legislation," Omar said.
"And to that regard, I would say that he is right. I haven't seen any pieces of legislation or ordinances come through in the United States since 2020."
That answer is easier to defend than the broader claim that no serious candidate has supported defunding or abolition.
A politician can endorse a movement goal without introducing legislation to implement the entire goal immediately.
And a political organization can maintain a long-term objective even while candidates associated with it emphasize more incremental policies during an election.
The Democratic Socialists of America's current national program makes that distinction especially important.
DSA released its new Workers Deserve More program in July 2026.
The document does not merely call for police reform.
Under a section titled "End Mass Incarceration and Police Immunity," it calls for demilitarizing police departments, weakening police-union power and redirecting funding toward public services.
It describes those policies as "steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system."
That is an official national DSA program adopted in 2026, not simply a social-media slogan left over from 2020.
The same program also calls to "Abolish ICE" and proposes ending detention and deportations, legalizing migration, granting amnesty regardless of immigration status and ending visa caps and quotas.
It separately calls for abolishing the U.S. Senate and replacing the current political system with a different democratic structure.
Those positions help explain why Favreau raised the issue with Sanders in the first place.
But one part of the criticism also requires precision.
The official 2026 DSA program does not explicitly say "abolish national borders."
DSA national co-chair Megan Romer did affirm that idea during a July interview on Fox News and described some of the organization's more sweeping proposals, including eliminating borders and prisons, as part of a long-term vision.
The distinction is important because an organization's formal program and statements made by one of its national leaders are related but not identical sources of policy.
The official document supports legalizing migration and ending visa caps and quotas.
Romer went further by affirming the eventual elimination of national borders.
Sanders rejected that framing in his conversation with Favreau.
"Open borders? No," Sanders said.
He said he supports comprehensive immigration reform rather than removing all border restrictions.
On prisons, he made a similar distinction.
Sanders said the United States incarcerates too many people and should reduce the number held in custody.
But he rejected the proposition that dangerous offenders should never be imprisoned.
"Does that mean that there should not be dangerous people who should be behind bars? Of course, everybody agrees with that," Sanders said.
Those comments put Sanders in a different place from the literal language of the DSA's 2026 national program on police and prisons.
That is not necessarily surprising.
Sanders identifies as a democratic socialist, but he is an independent senator with his own political agenda rather than a spokesman required to adopt every plank of DSA's national program.
The larger issue is that the word "socialist" now covers candidates and organizations whose positions can differ significantly once a broad ideological label is translated into specific policy.
The Wisconsin governor's race provides a useful example.
Democratic socialist state Rep. Francesca Hong previously wrote that she supported defunding police as a first step toward abolition.
Those statements have become a major issue in her 2026 campaign.
But Hong now says she will not abolish the police and has emphasized that she is serious about public safety.
Her shift does not erase what she said earlier.
It does show why Sanders can plausibly argue that candidates trying to win office today are often running on different language from the abolitionist rhetoric of 2020.
The same pattern appears elsewhere on the left.
Candidates may support reallocating some police functions to mental-health professionals, ending qualified immunity, reducing incarceration or abolishing ICE without running on the literal slogan "defund the police."
Republicans tend to group those positions together as evidence of a broader abolitionist movement.
Progressives tend to separate immediate policy proposals from aspirational long-term goals.
Both sides gain political advantage from collapsing that distinction when it suits them.
That is why Sanders's phrase "no serious person" attracted attention.
It did more than reject one unpopular slogan.
It implicitly defined which ideas Sanders considers electorally serious at a moment when socialist candidates and DSA-backed campaigns are gaining more influence inside Democratic primaries.
The timing matters.
Progressive candidates have recently won several high-profile primaries, increasing scrutiny of whether the policies promoted by activist organizations will become liabilities in general elections.
Sanders's strategy appears to be to separate economic populism from the most politically vulnerable parts of the activist left.
He continues to advocate Medicare for All, stronger unions, higher taxes on the wealthy and a larger economic role for government.
At the same time, he is telling voters that socialism does not require eliminating police departments, abandoning prisons for violent offenders or opening national borders.
That may be an effective electoral distinction.
It is also a distinction that DSA's own program makes harder to sustain on policing and incarceration.
Omar's answer reveals the narrowest way to reconcile the two positions.
Sanders can be right that serious candidates are not currently introducing legislation to abolish police departments.
Critics can also be right that politicians and organizations associated with the movement have supported abolitionist goals, sometimes explicitly.
Those statements do not become imaginary simply because candidates later choose different campaign language.
The better question is therefore not whether "defund the police" disappeared from campaign signs.
It largely did.
The better question is which parts of the underlying movement survived after the slogan became politically toxic.
Police reform survived.
Arguments for moving some responsibilities away from armed officers survived.
Calls to reduce incarceration survived.
And inside DSA's formal program, the long-term goal of abolishing police and prisons survived too.
So Sanders's interview settled one point.
He does not want his version of democratic socialism defined by defunding police, abolishing prisons or open borders.
What it did not settle is whether those ideas can simply be dismissed as positions no serious political actor holds.
DSA's current national program, the record of the Minneapolis debate and the past positions of candidates now seeking higher office show that the history is more complicated.
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For Democrats heading into the midterms, that difference between what the movement once demanded, what its organizations still endorse and what its candidates now promise voters may be the real political argument.
