Ilhan Omar Deported? — What Happens If This Moves Forward?
Bernie Sanders is drawing a clearer boundary between the democratic socialism he has spent decades promoting and some of the abolitionist ideas now written into the program of the Democratic Socialists of America.
The distinction matters because Republicans are trying to make socialism itself a major issue in the final months before the 2026 midterm elections, while progressive candidates are winning enough Democratic primaries to force an argument over which version of the American left voters are actually being asked to support.
Sanders entered that argument during an August 5 appearance on Pod Save America, after host Jon Favreau asked whether candidates associated with the socialist left could damage a broader working-class coalition by embracing proposals such as abolishing prisons, defunding or abolishing police departments and eliminating national borders.
Sanders pushed back hard.
“No serious person that I know who is running for office believes in, quote unquote, defunding the police,” he said.
He did not deny the need for major policing reform. Sanders said departments should confront racism and argued that mental-health professionals, addiction specialists and other public-service workers should handle some responsibilities now placed on armed officers.
But he rejected eliminating police departments.
He made a similar distinction on prisons. Sanders said he hopes the United States eventually stops incarcerating people at anything close to its current scale, but he also said dangerous offenders still have to be confined.
On open borders, his answer was even shorter.
“No.”
Sanders said the progressives he knows generally favor comprehensive immigration reform rather than eliminating national borders.
Those comments were not a sudden reversal.
In June 2020, at the height of the national uprising following George Floyd’s murder, Sanders also rejected calls to abolish police departments. He advocated sweeping changes involving accountability, qualified immunity, civil-rights enforcement and the transfer of some nonviolent responsibilities away from police, but said the country would still need trained law-enforcement professionals.
That record is important because the current controversy is sometimes framed as though Sanders quietly abandoned an abolitionist program he once supported.
He did not.
Sanders has long been far to the left of the Democratic establishment on health care, labor rights, taxation, corporate power and the social safety net. On policing and incarceration, however, his approach has generally been transformative reform rather than elimination of the institutions themselves.
The more difficult question is whether his description of the broader movement is too narrow.
Two days after the Pod Save America interview, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins put Sanders’ statement to Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
Omar represents Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed and where the post-2020 debate over policing became one of the country’s most consequential tests of the “defund” movement.
Omar did not simply say that Sanders was correct in every sense.
She argued that Minneapolis had been forced into a deeper debate about public safety because the police department had lost trust among many residents. She said that once a local discussion became a national slogan, much of the substance was lost.
When Collins pressed her on whether Sanders was right that no serious candidate currently believed in defunding police, Omar narrowed the claim.
She said she interpreted Sanders as talking about candidates putting forward actual legislation, adding that she had not seen legislation or ordinances advancing such a policy in the United States since 2020.
That answer requires an important correction.
Minneapolis itself held a citywide vote in November 2021 on Question 2, a proposed charter amendment that would have removed the Minneapolis Police Department from the city charter and replaced it with a Department of Public Safety using a broader public-health approach.
The proposed department could still have included licensed police officers, but the charter requirement for a minimum police force would have disappeared and the existing Police Department and police chief would have been removed from the charter structure.
Omar publicly supported Question 2.
Minneapolis voters rejected it.
Official results show 56.17 percent voted no and 43.83 percent voted yes.
So Omar was correct that the national political environment has moved away from the 2020 slogan, but her statement that she had not seen legislation or ordinances of that kind “since 2020” overlooked a major 2021 measure in her own city that she endorsed.
Her earlier record is even clearer.
In a June 14, 2020 CNN interview, Omar said the Minneapolis Police Department was “rotten to the root” and argued that the existing policing infrastructure “should not exist anymore.”
She did not argue that rapes, murders or other serious crimes should simply go unanswered. In the same interview, she explicitly said a replacement public-safety system would still have to investigate crimes and respond when residents were in danger.
But she did support dismantling the existing department and rebuilding a different structure.
That history does not mean Omar is currently campaigning on a national bill to abolish police departments.
It does mean the abolition debate was not invented by conservative media.
The same distinction becomes even more important when the discussion moves from individual candidates to the Democratic Socialists of America.
Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist, but he is not a member of DSA and has never been one. His presidential campaigns helped make the phrase “democratic socialism” politically recognizable to millions of Americans and helped fuel DSA’s growth, yet he remains an independent political actor with his own program.
That organizational separation is no longer a minor technicality.
DSA’s current national program, drafted and approved in 2026, goes substantially further than Sanders on policing, prisons, immigration enforcement and the structure of the federal government.
Under a section titled “End Mass Incarceration and Police Immunity,” the program calls for demilitarizing police departments, weakening police-union power and redirecting law-enforcement funding toward public services as steps toward “fully abolishing the police and prison system.”
That language is explicit.
DSA’s National Abolition Working Group is more explicit still.
Its published demands say police budgets should be prevented from expanding and then cut annually “towards zero,” while the organization works toward abolition of police and prisons and greater investment in community-based institutions.
Those are not Republican paraphrases.
They are DSA’s own words.
The organization’s immigration program is also much further left than Sanders’ answer to Favreau.
DSA calls for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ending immigration detention and deportations, legalizing migration, granting amnesty regardless of current immigration status and eliminating visa caps and quotas.
There is, however, one factual distinction that should be kept clear.
The phrase “abolish national borders” does not appear as an explicit plank on the published 2026 Workers Deserve More program page.
That broader idea came into the 2026 debate through DSA national co-chair Megan Romer.
During a July 26 Fox News Sunday interview, Shannon Bream presented Romer with a rapid series of proposals and asked whether they reflected the organization’s agenda.
Romer affirmed abolishing the Senate, replacing the current presidency and Supreme Court structure, abolishing ICE, defunding the Pentagon, phasing out prisons and moving major corporations toward public ownership.
When Bream asked about abolishing borders and granting amnesty to people living in the United States illegally, Romer answered that it was part of a “long-term plan.”
That answer matters because it confirms that border abolition is a real idea inside DSA leadership even though the exact phrase is not written as a standalone demand in the organization’s current public program.
The difference may sound technical, but it is precisely the kind of distinction that separates fact-checking from political advertising.
Republicans do not need to invent the police- and prison-abolition language.
DSA publishes it.
They also do not need to claim that every Democrat or every Sanders-backed candidate supports every DSA plank.
That part would be false.
The Democratic Party contains moderates, liberals, progressives, democratic socialists and candidates who have no relationship with DSA at all.
Even Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democratic Senate nominee whose primary victory Sanders enthusiastically supported, is not a DSA member, despite Republican efforts to fold him into a broader socialist narrative.
At the same time, El-Sayed illustrates why Sanders’ formulation can sound incomplete.
CNN’s KFile reported in July that El-Sayed had explicitly supported defunding police in 2020, including saying in one interview, “We do need to defund the police.” He has since distanced himself from that position and has disputed how his earlier statements have been characterized.
That does not make Sanders a liar when he says the serious candidates he currently knows and supports are not campaigning to defund police departments.
It does show that some prominent candidates in his political orbit have histories with the slogan that Republicans can document rather than manufacture.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani provides another example.
In 2020, Mamdani publicly called for the NYPD to be defunded and, in another post, wrote: “Defund it. Dismantle it.”
By the 2025 mayoral campaign, his position had changed.
“I am not defunding the police. I am not running to defund the police,” Mamdani said after a deadly Manhattan shooting.
He later retained Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch after winning the mayoralty and shifted his public-safety argument toward allowing police to focus on serious crime while mental-health and other civilian professionals handle some calls now assigned to officers.
That evolution is politically significant.
It also demonstrates why past statements and current platforms have to be separated.
Mamdani did support defunding and dismantling the NYPD in 2020.
He did not run for mayor in 2025 on a promise to abolish the department.
Both facts can be true at the same time.
The broader movement has undergone a similar change in language.
After 2020, “defund the police” became politically toxic in many parts of the country. Democratic candidates who had never supported the slogan were repeatedly forced to answer for it, while many elected officials who once used or defended the language shifted toward talking about mental-health response teams, violence prevention, accountability and reallocating specific responsibilities rather than eliminating police budgets.
That rhetorical shift did not erase abolitionist organizing.
DSA’s 2026 program proves that.
The tension is therefore not between a Republican fiction and a progressive reality.
It is between different realities on the American left.
Sanders represents one.
DSA’s national abolitionist program represents another.
Omar’s political history sits somewhere between them.
Sanders’ version of democratic socialism has traditionally centered on material economic demands: universal health coverage, stronger unions, lower prescription-drug prices, higher taxes on wealthy Americans, expanded public benefits and greater worker power.
His argument is that those ideas can build a large coalition among working-class voters who may hold much more moderate views on policing, prisons or immigration.
The current DSA program is more structurally radical.
It says the organization ultimately wants not simply a stronger welfare state but a different political and economic order. It calls for public ownership of the largest corporations, abolition of the Senate, replacement of the current presidency and Supreme Court structure, and the creation of what it describes as a democratic socialist republic.
That is not simply Scandinavian-style social spending.
It is an institutional program.
And it creates a real strategic problem for candidates who want DSA activists, volunteers or endorsements while campaigning before electorates that may support progressive economic policies but reject abolition of police, prisons or immigration enforcement.
Republicans see that opening.
Reuters reported on September 3 that the GOP is pursuing a two-track midterm strategy: continue talking about the economy while increasingly portraying Democrats as captured by a rising socialist left.
That strategy has become more attractive because progressive candidates have posted a series of notable primary victories in 2026, including contests well outside the most stereotypically left-wing neighborhoods.
Republicans are betting that voters will connect those wins to DSA’s most sweeping proposals.
Democrats are arguing that the association is often misleading.
Both sides have evidence available to them.
Republicans can quote DSA’s program directly.
Democrats can point out that DSA is not the Democratic Party, that Sanders is not a DSA member, that El-Sayed is not a DSA member and that individual candidates frequently depart from organizational platforms.
The political question is which distinction voters will find more persuasive.
That debate has become especially important because DSA-backed and DSA-adjacent candidates often campaign first on affordability.
Housing costs.
Health care.
Wages.
Child care.
Corporate concentration.
Those issues can attract voters who do not identify as socialists at all.
The danger for the left is that an opponent can move the conversation from rent or medical bills to abolishing the Senate, prisons or ICE by quoting the movement’s own documents.
The danger for Republicans is the reverse: if voters believe those attacks are merely guilt by association, they may see them as an attempt to avoid economic questions that are hurting the governing party.
That is why Sanders’ Pod Save America answer was more strategic than ideological.
He was trying to protect the coalition he has spent years building from being defined by positions that are not central to his own agenda.
His response to Favreau repeatedly returned to practical functions.
Communities still need police services.
Dangerous offenders sometimes have to be imprisoned.
A country still has borders.
But police should be accountable, incarceration should be dramatically reduced and immigration law should be reformed.
That is a recognizable Sanders line.
It is also a different line from DSA’s abolition program.
Omar’s CNN response showed why progressives have difficulty discussing the gap.
She was right that the national meaning of “defund” often swallowed the more complicated Minneapolis argument over what work should be done by armed police, what work should be shifted elsewhere and whether a department with a documented crisis of legitimacy could be restructured.
But the historical record cannot be reduced to a messaging problem.
Omar herself called for dismantling the department.
She supported the 2021 charter amendment.
And voters rejected it.
The current debate is stronger when that history is acknowledged rather than minimized.
The same rule applies to DSA.
It is inaccurate to claim that every democratic socialist wants to abolish police, prisons and borders.
Sanders plainly does not.
It is also inaccurate to claim those ideas exist only in conservative caricatures.
DSA’s national program explicitly embraces police and prison abolition as an ultimate goal, and its national co-chair has publicly described border abolition as part of a longer-term vision.
The distinction between current campaigns and long-term ideological goals also matters.
Romer herself emphasized that some of the most sweeping proposals are not immediate legislative demands. DSA’s program similarly says some objectives may be pursued under the current system while complete victory would require building a new society.
That can be a meaningful distinction for activists.
For a general-election campaign, it may be a difficult one.
Opponents rarely advertise the most moderate part of an organization’s platform.
They advertise the part most likely to frighten swing voters.
Sanders understands that problem because he has spent decades trying to make left-wing economics sound concrete rather than abstract.
He talks about what a prescription costs, what a worker earns and whether a family can afford a doctor.
Abolishing the Senate or reducing police budgets annually toward zero pulls the argument onto very different terrain.
The 2026 midterms will test which terrain matters more.
Progressives believe voters angry about prices, inequality and corporate power are increasingly willing to support candidates far outside the old Democratic establishment.
Republicans believe the same candidates can be defeated if voters are shown the most radical ideas circulating in the organizations around them.
Sanders is trying to separate those two conversations.
DSA is insisting they belong together as part of a deeper transformation.
Omar is trying to explain how the most explosive policing debate emerged without allowing its 2020 language to define every progressive campaign in 2026.
There is no clean partisan slogan that captures all three positions.
The most accurate conclusion is more complicated.
Sanders is correct about his own record and about the fact that many serious progressive candidates are not currently campaigning to abolish police departments, prisons or national borders.
His statement becomes less complete when read as a description of the entire organized socialist left.
Omar is correct that the Minneapolis debate involved more than a hashtag and that advocates envisioned replacement public-safety institutions rather than a society in which violent crime simply went unanswered.
Her 2026 claim about the absence of post-2020 legislation, however, sits awkwardly beside the 2021 Minneapolis charter measure she supported.
Republicans are correct that abolitionist ideas are genuinely present in DSA.
They are not correct when they automatically assign every DSA plank to every Democrat, every progressive or every candidate Sanders endorses.
That is the divide Sanders has now made visible.
It is not democratic socialism versus capitalism in the abstract.
It is a fight inside the left over what democratic socialism should mean when it moves from activist organizations to ballots that millions of non-socialist voters will decide.
Sanders wants the answer to begin with wages, health care, housing and economic power.
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DSA’s program says the project ultimately goes much further.
And Republicans intend to make sure voters hear about the difference before November.
