ILHAN OMAR DEPORTATION DEBATE ERUPTS — WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
Sanders Says No Serious Candidate Wants to Defund the Police - But Democrats Are Still Fighting Over What the Left Actually Believes
Six years after "defund the police" became one of the most politically damaging slogans associated with the American left, leading progressives are still trying to define what the movement meant - and whether it still belongs in Democratic politics.
Sen. Bernie Sanders offered one of the clearest attempts to draw that line this month.
Asked on Pod Save America about candidates associated with democratic socialism who have supported defunding or abolishing police departments, abolishing prisons, or eliminating national borders, Sanders said those positions did not describe the serious candidates he knows and supports.
"No serious person that I know who is running for office believes in, quote-unquote, defunding the police," Sanders said.
He then made his own position more specific.
Sanders said police departments need reform, including efforts to address racism and to shift some mental-health and substance-abuse calls away from officers. But he also said police perform a necessary and difficult job.
On prisons, he said he hoped the United States would incarcerate far fewer people, while rejecting the idea that dangerous offenders should never be imprisoned.
On immigration, he was equally direct: "Open borders? No."
That sounds like a clean break with some of the rhetoric that came out of the left after George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis in 2020.
The political record is not quite that clean.
Several candidates who became serious contenders in 2026 had previously supported some version of defunding the police, even if they later changed, narrowed, or rejected those positions.
Associated Press reporting identified three prominent examples.
Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed had previously expressed support for defunding the police but now says he rejects the idea.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had called for defunding the NYPD in 2020 but later apologized for the rhetoric and said he no longer supports cutting the department's funding.
Wisconsin state Rep. Francesca Hong wrote in 2020 that she supported defunding the police as a first step toward abolishing the police. During her 2026 gubernatorial campaign, she said she did not support cutting police funding. She ultimately lost the Democratic primary on August 11 to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley.
That history makes Sanders' formulation accurate only if it is read as a claim about the current positions of the candidates he considers serious - not as a claim that the defund movement never had meaningful support among prominent progressives.
Rep. Ilhan Omar was asked to explain that distinction two days after Sanders' interview.
Appearing on CNN with Kaitlan Collins, Omar did not simply say the issue had been invented by conservatives.
She pointed instead to Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered and where the policing debate became more radical than in much of the country.
"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.
She described the Minneapolis Police Department as deeply problematic and argued that the substance of the local debate became distorted when it turned into a national slogan.
There is factual support for the claim that Minneapolis had serious policing problems.
A Justice Department civil-rights investigation concluded in 2023 that the Minneapolis Police Department engaged in a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct, including excessive force and racial discrimination in enforcement. The city and the federal government later reached an agreement intended to address those findings.
That does not answer the separate question of whether abolishing or defunding the department was the right solution.
Minneapolis voters were asked a version of that question directly in 2021.
A charter amendment would have removed the Police Department from the city charter and replaced it with a Department of Public Safety using a public-health approach. The new department could still have employed licensed police officers, but the charter's minimum police-funding requirement would have been eliminated.
Omar supported that ballot measure.
Minneapolis voters rejected it, 56.17 percent to 43.83 percent.
That result is important because it shows that the argument over police restructuring was not simply a right-wing caricature imposed on the city from outside.
It was a real policy fight in Omar's district, backed by prominent elected officials and rejected by a majority of voters.
Collins therefore pressed Omar on Sanders' claim that no serious person running for office supports defunding the police.
Omar answered by narrowing the standard.
"When he says that, I think he's talking about someone putting forth a piece of legislation," she 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 captures the political retreat from the slogan, but it also changes the question.
Sanders was asked whether candidates associated with his broader movement had embraced defunding or abolitionist ideas. Omar responded by asking whether lawmakers were currently advancing formal legislation or ordinances under those labels.
Those are not the same standard.
A politician can stop introducing a proposal, change the language used to describe it, or shift toward a different public-safety framework without proving that the earlier debate never happened.
At the same time, a six-year-old social-media post does not necessarily establish what a candidate would do in office today.
That is the tension Democrats are dealing with in 2026.
Republicans want voters to treat the most sweeping statements made during the 2020 protest period as the permanent ideology of the Democratic left.
Progressive candidates increasingly argue that their current programs should be judged on what they are proposing now, not on the most provocative slogan they used during a period of national unrest.
Both sides have evidence they can point to.
The Democratic Socialists of America's current national program is substantially more radical on policing than Sanders' comments.
The 2026 DSA program calls for demilitarizing police departments, weakening police-union power, and redirecting funding to public services as steps toward fully abolishing the police and prison system.
The same program calls for abolishing ICE, ending detention and deportations, granting broad amnesty, replacing the presidency and Supreme Court with institutions subordinate to Congress, and abolishing the Senate.
DSA national co-chair Megan Romer publicly confirmed several of those positions in a July Fox News Sunday interview, while describing some - including eliminating borders and prisons - as long-term goals.
So Sanders is correct that the serious candidates he knows may not currently be campaigning on defunding police, open borders, or abolishing prisons.
He is not describing the full official program of DSA.
That distinction matters because Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist but has never been a simple spokesman for every position adopted by DSA.
His political project has historically centered on Medicare for All, labor power, higher taxes on wealthy Americans, free or heavily subsidized higher education, and a much larger social safety net.
Police abolition and border abolition have not been defining parts of his national platform.
The question for Democrats is how much separation voters will recognize between Sanders-style economic populism, DSA's institutional program, and candidates who may receive support from the same activist networks.
The 2026 primaries show why that is not an academic question.
El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate nomination in Michigan after facing scrutiny over earlier defund rhetoric. Hong, whose past statements were even more explicit, narrowly lost in Wisconsin after trying to move the campaign away from those slogans.
Those outcomes point in different directions.
They suggest that a past defund position is not automatically disqualifying in a Democratic primary, but they also show why candidates in competitive states are spending time explaining or revising those positions rather than campaigning on them openly.
Omar's own history illustrates the same evolution.
She supported replacing the Minneapolis Police Department in the city charter after Floyd's murder. In her CNN interview, however, she emphasized trust, safer communities, and reform rather than arguing that Minneapolis should have no police force.
That is a meaningful change in political emphasis even if it is not a repudiation of everything she supported in 2020 and 2021.
The strongest argument for Sanders is therefore narrower than his phrase "no serious person" suggests.
Most nationally competitive Democratic candidates in 2026 are not running on a straightforward promise to slash police budgets, eliminate police departments, abolish prisons, or erase national borders.
Several have moved away from earlier versions of those positions.
But the strongest criticism of Sanders is also straightforward.
Those ideas were not invented by Republican advertising. They were advocated by real progressive politicians and activists, and important parts of the abolitionist agenda remain in DSA's official program today.
Pretending the debate exists only because conservatives amplify it makes it harder to explain why prominent candidates are now being asked to disavow or reinterpret their own past statements.
The better question is not whether the left ever supported defunding the police.
Parts of it clearly did.
The better question is what those politicians mean now when they say they have moved on from the slogan.
For some, the change appears substantive: they now explicitly support maintaining police funding and keeping dangerous offenders in prison.
For others, the emphasis has shifted from the slogan to policies that move responsibilities and resources away from traditional law enforcement without using the word defund.
Those differences deserve to be examined candidate by candidate.
They should not be erased by treating every progressive as a police abolitionist, and they should not be erased by declaring that no serious candidate ever belonged to the movement in the first place.
The Minneapolis experience provides a useful reality check.
The city's police department had documented constitutional problems serious enough to trigger federal intervention. Reform was not an imaginary need.
But when voters were asked whether to remove the Police Department from the charter and create a new public-safety department, a clear majority said no.
That result helps explain the politics Democrats face now
.
Voters can support police reform, alternatives for mental-health calls, accountability for misconduct, and investment in violence prevention without supporting abolition or broad cuts to police budgets.
Sanders appears to be drawing his movement toward that distinction.
Omar appears to be trying to explain how Minneapolis arrived there after a much more radical debate.
DSA, meanwhile, is still publishing a program that goes considerably further than either of them did in these interviews.
That leaves the Democratic left with a problem of definition.
If abolition is only a long-term aspiration with no near-term legislation attached, voters will still want to know what concrete steps candidates would take toward it.
If candidates no longer support defunding police, they will have to explain which earlier policies they have actually abandoned and which they have merely renamed.
And if Sanders believes Republicans are unfairly attaching fringe positions to his entire movement, the clearest answer is not to deny that those positions exist.
It is to draw the boundary himself.
His Pod Save America interview began to do that.
Omar's CNN appearance showed why the boundary remains difficult to define.
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The political slogan may be fading.
The argument over policing, punishment, and the limits of the progressive movement is not.
