How Would You Feel About Ilhan Omar Being Deported?11
Sen. Bernie Sanders is drawing a sharper line between his own brand of democratic socialism and some of the most controversial positions associated with the Democratic Socialists of America, reopening a debate that has followed Democrats since the protests and public-safety fights of 2020.
The Vermont independent said during an Aug. 5 appearance on the Pod Save America podcast that he does not know any serious candidate currently running for office who supports defunding the police, abolishing prisons or opening the nation’s borders.
“No serious person that I know who is running for office believes in, quote-unquote, ‘defunding the police,’” Sanders told host Jon Favreau.
Sanders said police departments still need reform and argued that racism within law enforcement must be addressed. He also said some calls involving mental health or drug addiction could be handled by professionals other than armed officers.
But he rejected the idea that public safety can simply operate without police.
“I was a mayor for eight years. I worked very closely with cops. They have a very difficult job,” Sanders said.
He made a similar distinction on prisons. Sanders said the United States incarcerates too many people and should reduce its reliance on imprisonment, while rejecting the idea that dangerous offenders should never be jailed.
“I hope the day comes when we don’t lead the world in the number of people who are incarcerated,” Sanders said. “That speaks very poorly of our society.”
He then added: “But does that mean that there should not be dangerous people who should be behind bars? Of course, everybody agrees with that.”
Sanders was equally direct when Favreau raised immigration.
“Open borders? No,” he said. “Most of us believe in comprehensive immigration reform, not opening up all the borders.”
The comments were notable because Sanders remains the country’s most prominent politician who openly describes himself as a democratic socialist. But he is not formally affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, and the distinction between Sanders’ politics and the DSA’s newly publicized national program has become increasingly important during the 2026 election cycle.
The DSA’s current program goes substantially further than Sanders did in the Pod Save America interview. The organization calls for abolishing the Senate, replacing the presidency and Supreme Court with institutions subordinate to Congress, abolishing ICE, reducing or eliminating major parts of the prison system, defunding the Pentagon and eventually creating a political system without national borders.
DSA national co-chair Megan Romer publicly defended those goals during a July 26 appearance on Fox News Sunday.
Asked whether the organization supports abolishing the Senate, Romer answered, “True.” She also affirmed proposals to abolish ICE and said eliminating national borders and sharply reducing prisons are part of the organization’s long-term program.
Romer argued that the proposals should be understood as a broader effort to restructure institutions that democratic socialists consider unrepresentative or unjust, rather than as a checklist of measures every DSA-backed candidate would immediately enact after taking office.
That caveat matters. A national organization’s platform does not automatically establish the position of every candidate it supports, just as Sanders’ use of the democratic-socialist label does not make him a spokesman for every DSA policy.
But the differences are politically useful to Republicans, who are increasingly trying to connect Democratic candidates to the DSA’s most far-reaching proposals ahead of the November midterms.
The debate gained new urgency because DSA-backed and socialist-aligned candidates have scored a series of high-profile primary victories in 2026.
In Michigan, progressive Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary after defeating establishment-backed Rep. Haley Stevens. In Florida, democratic socialist Angie Nixon upset heavily funded former national-security official Alexander Vindman in the Democratic Senate primary. In Colorado, democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeated longtime Rep. Diana DeGette in a House primary.
Those results have given the socialist left more influence inside Democratic politics while simultaneously giving Republicans a new line of attack.
Reuters reported this week that Republicans are openly treating the progressive primary victories as an opportunity to portray Democrats as moving toward positions outside the political mainstream. Some Democrats, meanwhile, argue that the victories reflect voter frustration with the party establishment and should be debated rather than dismissed.
That is the political environment in which Rep. Ilhan Omar was asked to respond to Sanders.
During an Aug. 7 interview on CNN’s The Source, host Kaitlan Collins played Sanders’ comments and asked Omar whether it was accurate to say that no serious candidate supports defunding the police.
Omar did not simply answer yes or no. Instead, she returned to Minneapolis and the upheaval that followed George Floyd’s murder 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 continued.
Omar argued that the local Minneapolis debate changed once it became a national political slogan.
“And when that conversation becomes nationalized, then you sort of get the kind of messaging that gets sort of lost in the void,” she said.
“Minneapolis has come a long way. We still have a long way to go. And I think that is sort of what Bernie was speaking to,” Omar added.
Collins pressed her again on Sanders’ exact claim.
“I mean, when he says that, I think he’s talking about someone putting forth a piece of legislation,” Omar responded.
“And to that regard, I would say that he is right,” she said. “I haven’t seen any pieces of legislation or ordinances come through in the United States since 2020.”
Omar’s answer focused on what candidates and lawmakers are formally advancing now. It did not erase her own earlier record in the Minneapolis public-safety debate.
In June 2020, Omar publicly defended dismantling and replacing the Minneapolis Police Department, telling CNN that the department was “rotten to the root” and could not simply be reformed.
The following year, she supported Minneapolis Question 2, a city charter amendment that would have removed the Minneapolis Police Department from the charter and replaced it with a Department of Public Safety using what the ballot described as a comprehensive public-health approach.
The proposed department could have included licensed police officers, but it would have eliminated the existing charter structure and minimum police staffing requirement.
Minneapolis voters rejected the measure in November 2021, with more than 56 percent voting no.
That history makes the present exchange more complicated than either side’s preferred slogan.
It is accurate that Omar once supported dismantling the existing Minneapolis police structure and replacing it with a new public-safety agency. It is also accurate that the 2021 proposal did not simply call for eliminating every police function, and that Omar’s 2026 comments were specifically about whether current candidates are advancing legislation to defund police departments.
The larger problem for Democrats is that the phrase “defund the police” never had a single agreed-upon meaning.
For some activists, it meant shifting portions of police budgets toward housing, mental-health response, addiction treatment and social services. For others, it meant dramatically shrinking armed law enforcement. Some organizers openly described abolition of traditional police departments as the long-term goal.
Republicans generally treated all of those variations as a single proposition: Democrats wanted fewer police and weaker law enforcement.
That framing proved politically damaging after 2020, particularly as concerns about violent crime rose in several cities and moderate Democrats tried to distance themselves from the slogan.
Sanders now appears determined to separate police reform from police abolition.
His argument is that the political right takes the most provocative statement made by any activist and assigns it to every Democrat or progressive candidate.
“A lot of this stuff,” Sanders said, is amplified by conservative media and Republican advertising even though “most of the serious candidates that I know and support do not support those things.”
The DSA’s current program makes that defense harder to communicate because the organization itself is openly defending several proposals Sanders rejects or substantially narrows.
For example, the DSA program calls for a unicameral Congress without the Senate, an executive and judiciary subordinate to the legislature, public ownership of the largest corporations and a fundamental restructuring of immigration and criminal-justice institutions.
The organization says those proposals are part of a democratic transformation intended to give working people more power. Its critics describe them as evidence that the socialist movement is seeking to dismantle core American institutions.
The constitutional reality is that some of the DSA’s structural goals could not be enacted through ordinary legislation alone. Abolishing the Senate, for example, would require enormous constitutional change, including confronting the Constitution’s protection of equal state representation in the Senate.
That means the platform is partly a statement of long-term ideological direction rather than an agenda that a newly elected House member could simply pass in the next Congress.
Still, long-term ideological goals matter in elections because voters use them to judge a movement’s direction, not only the bills it can enact immediately.
That is why Sanders’ language is politically significant.
Rather than endorsing every demand associated with the socialist left, he is defining a narrower set of positions he regards as serious and electorally viable: police reform without eliminating policing, fewer incarcerations without abolishing prisons for dangerous offenders, and immigration reform without open borders.
Omar’s response occupies a different position. She is not disavowing the Minneapolis debate that made her one of the national faces of public-safety restructuring after Floyd’s death. Instead, she is arguing that the nationalized “defund” label no longer accurately describes what serious candidates are legislating today.
The distinction may become increasingly important as Democratic candidates backed by the DSA compete in general elections outside deep-blue districts.
Angie Nixon’s Florida Senate nomination is one example. The Wall Street Journal reported that Nixon has distanced herself from defunding the police as she prepares for a difficult statewide contest, even while continuing to identify with democratic socialism and campaign on economic populism.
That is precisely the strategic problem Sanders was describing: candidates may embrace aggressive economic policies and systemic reform while deciding that slogans associated with 2020 are electoral liabilities.
The Democratic Party is therefore dealing with two debates at once.
One is ideological: how much of the DSA’s program should Democrats or democratic-socialist candidates embrace?
The other is tactical: which ideas can win support beyond heavily progressive primary electorates?
Recent primary results do not provide a single answer. Socialist candidates have defeated establishment Democrats in several major races, while other progressive challengers have lost badly in districts where voters favored more conventional incumbents.
What the Sanders-Omar exchange makes clear is that the left’s internal argument is no longer simply about whether the movement should be more ambitious.
It is also about which parts of the movement’s recent history its most prominent figures want to carry into the next election — and which they want voters to view as a debate belonging to 2020 rather than 2026.
Sanders is saying plainly that defunding police, abolishing prisons and opening borders are not the agenda of the serious candidates he knows and supports.
Omar is saying the Minneapolis experience cannot be reduced to a national slogan and that she does not see current legislation pursuing those goals.
The DSA, meanwhile, is openly defending a broader long-term program that includes some of the very institutional changes Sanders is distancing himself from.
Those positions can coexist inside a heterogeneous political left, but they are not the same position.
As the midterms approach, Republicans will try to erase those distinctions. Democrats and progressive candidates will have to decide whether to emphasize them, defend the underlying ideas or change the subject to economic issues they believe are more favorable terrain.
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The political fight over “defund the police” may no longer look like it did in 2020. But six years later, the argument over what the slogan meant — and what the socialist left now wants — is still shaping Democratic politics.
