How Would You Feel About Ilhan Omar Being Deported?

Bernie Sanders Says 'No Serious Person' Wants to Defund Police—Ilhan Omar's Answer Shows Why Democrats Still Can't Escape 2020

Bernie Sanders is trying to draw a line between the socialist movement he helped popularize and some of the slogans that became political liabilities for Democrats after 2020.

Ilhan Omar's response shows why that line is harder to draw than it sounds.

During an August 5 appearance on Pod Save America, host Jon Favreau asked Sanders about Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates who have supported ideas such as defunding or abolishing police departments, abolishing prisons and eliminating national borders.

Sanders pushed back on the premise.

"No serious person that I know who is running for office believes in, quote unquote, defunding the police," he said.

Sanders then made a distinction that has been central to his own position for years. He supports major police reform. He argues that armed officers should not be the default response to every mental-health crisis, addiction problem or social emergency. He says racism and misconduct inside police departments must be confronted. But he does not support eliminating ordinary law enforcement or pretending dangerous people do not sometimes need to be incarcerated.

That is not a new position for Sanders.

As the "defund the police" slogan surged after George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis in 2020, Sanders resisted calls to abolish police departments and instead argued for better-trained, better-paid officers, stronger accountability and a narrower definition of which problems police should be expected to solve.

Six years later, he is making the same argument in more explicitly electoral language.

His point is that Republicans take the most radical statement associated with the broader left, place it in an advertisement and then tell voters that every Democrat supports it.

There is plenty of evidence that this happens.

But Sanders' formulation created its own problem because "no serious person" is much broader than saying "most Democratic candidates do not support defunding police."

Some candidates really did support it.

Some still defend versions of police abolition as a long-term goal.

And some elected officials who no longer use the slogan were previously much closer to it than Sanders was.

That is why CNN's Kaitlan Collins asked Ilhan Omar about Sanders' answer two days later.

Omar represents Minneapolis, the city where George Floyd was murdered and where the national argument over policing became a local governing question rather than merely a slogan.

She did not simply say Sanders was right.

Instead, she explained why the Minneapolis debate was different.

Omar said her city had been forced to have a deeper conversation about public safety because of what she described as a deeply problematic police department. She argued that once the Minneapolis debate became nationalized, much of its local context disappeared and the message was reduced to a political slogan.

That is a fair description of part of what happened.

Minneapolis was not debating policing in the abstract. The city was dealing with the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, years of accusations involving excessive force and racial discrimination, public protests, declining trust and an extraordinarily difficult argument over whether the existing Minneapolis Police Department could be reformed.

But Collins then returned to Sanders' actual words.

Was it really true that no serious candidate supported defunding the police?

Omar narrowed the question.

She said she understood Sanders to mean someone actually putting forward legislation, and on that basis she agreed with him. She added that she had not seen legislation or ordinances come through in the United States since 2020.

That answer is politically revealing because it is not exactly what Sanders said.

Sanders was talking about the positions of people running for office.

Omar changed the test to whether legislation had been enacted or successfully advanced.

Those are different standards.

And Omar's own political record helps explain why the distinction matters.

In 2020, Omar did not merely call for ordinary police reform. She publicly argued that the Minneapolis Police Department had proved itself "beyond reform" and said the city should disband the department and reimagine public safety.

Then, in 2021, Omar supported Minneapolis Question 2, a proposed charter amendment that would have replaced the Minneapolis Police Department in the city charter with a Department of Public Safety organized around a broader public-health approach.

The proposal could still have included licensed police officers. It was not a ballot question literally saying "abolish all police."

But it would have removed the existing police department from the charter, eliminated the charter's minimum-police-staffing language and established a new public-safety structure.

Minneapolis voters rejected it, roughly 56% to 44%.

That history does not make Omar dishonest when she says the debate has evolved.

It does make Sanders' blanket statement difficult to square with the actual progressive record.

A better formulation would be that relatively few competitive Democratic candidates now campaign on the words "defund the police," and many politicians who once embraced the slogan have moved toward different language about public safety, alternative responders, accountability and targeted reform.

That claim is much easier to defend.

The larger political shift is obvious.

"Defund the police" became one of the clearest examples of a movement slogan that meant very different things to different people.

For some activists, defunding meant moving a portion of police budgets into housing, mental-health treatment, violence prevention and social services.

For others, it was explicitly a first step toward abolishing conventional police departments.

For many voters, none of those distinctions mattered. They heard the phrase and understood it to mean fewer police officers.

Republicans recognized the vulnerability immediately.

Democrats spent years arguing about whether the problem was the policy, the slogan or Republican distortion.

By 2026, much of the elected left has stopped having that argument on Republican terms.

Candidates increasingly emphasize affordability, housing, health care, wages and the cost of living. Even politicians who want major structural changes to policing often describe those changes as public-safety reform rather than "defunding."

Sanders is part of that shift.

His argument is not that police departments are functioning perfectly.

It is that serious left-wing politics does not require pretending that communities can function without law enforcement or that dangerous offenders never need incarceration.

On the same podcast, Sanders rejected abolishing prisons in absolute terms. He said the United States incarcerates far too many people, but he also said dangerous people sometimes belong behind bars.

He likewise rejected open borders.

He supports comprehensive immigration reform, but he said that does not mean eliminating national borders.

Those statements matter because the organized socialist movement Sanders helped inspire is currently having a more radical debate than Sanders himself.

The Democratic Socialists of America's new 2026 national program does not hide its institutional ambitions.

Its official "Workers Deserve More" program calls for abolishing ICE, ending ICE detention and deportations, granting amnesty regardless of immigration status, abolishing the Senate, replacing the president and Supreme Court with institutions subordinate to Congress, and establishing public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries.

DSA national co-chair Megan Romer was even more explicit during a July 26 Fox News Sunday interview.

Asked whether the organization supported abolishing the Senate, she said yes.

Asked about abolishing ICE, she said absolutely.

Asked about abolishing borders and providing amnesty, she described that as part of a longer-term plan rather than something to happen overnight.

Asked about abolishing prisons in large part, she again described it as part of a long-term program.

That creates a real ideological distinction that cannot simply be dismissed as Republican invention.

DSA is not the Democratic Party.

Bernie Sanders is an independent senator and is not a DSA officeholder.

A candidate receiving support from democratic socialists does not automatically endorse every plank of DSA's national program.

And the fact that an activist organization holds a position does not mean congressional Democrats as a whole share it.

But the opposite claim is also too easy.

When the national co-chair of a growing political organization openly confirms those objectives, opponents are not fabricating the existence of the ideas when they ask candidates whether they agree with them.

The fair question is which candidates actually do.

That is where Omar's CNN appearance becomes more important than a one-day messaging dispute.

She is standing between two competing political truths.

The first is Sanders' argument that Republicans routinely define the Democratic Party by its most radical activists rather than by what most Democratic candidates actually propose.

The second is that some of those radical policies were not invented by Republicans. They were openly advocated by progressive politicians and organizations, including in Omar's own city.

The Minneapolis experience is one of the strongest examples.

After George Floyd's murder, Omar supported replacing the existing police structure.

The proposal eventually went directly to voters.

Voters said no.

The city then proceeded down a different road: reforming the existing department rather than replacing it.

That history is precisely why a sentence such as "nobody serious supports defunding police" can sound like an attempt to erase a debate that happened in public only a few years ago.

At the same time, it would be equally misleading to pretend Omar's 2021 position means she is currently sponsoring federal legislation to abolish every police department in America.

She is not.

Her answer to Collins focused on Minneapolis and on the need for trusted public safety. It did not call for a new national police-defunding bill.

The strongest criticism of her answer is therefore narrower.

She avoided directly acknowledging that serious progressive politicians did support policies associated with defunding or replacing police departments, and she shifted Sanders' claim from candidate ideology to enacted legislation.

That is a messaging maneuver, not proof of some hidden national abolition bill.

It also reflects how much the Democratic Party's political incentives have changed since 2020.

Public safety became a major vulnerability in competitive elections. Democrats in swing districts often ran away from the slogan. Joe Biden explicitly rejected defunding police while he was president. Sanders had never embraced the slogan in the same way abolitionist activists did.

Today, even the progressive movement's most successful candidates often focus their campaigns on prices and economic populism while describing radical institutional changes as long-term goals, local questions or matters separate from the campaign at hand.

That leaves opponents with a strategy of their own.

They do not need every Democrat to support DSA's platform.

They need enough prominent figures to support enough controversial pieces of it that voters begin associating the entire party with the agenda.

Sanders understands that danger, which is why he is drawing boundaries.

Omar understands it too, which is why her answer emphasized context rather than repeating the language of 2020.

The debate over borders reveals the same pattern.

Sanders said he does not support open borders.

DSA's current program calls for legalizing migration, ending ICE detention and deportations and granting amnesty to all immigrants regardless of status. Romer has described border abolition as a long-term objective.

Omar herself currently advocates abolishing ICE and has continued to use that formulation in 2026.

Those positions are not identical.

Abolishing ICE does not necessarily mean abolishing the national border. Congress could eliminate one agency and transfer immigration enforcement functions elsewhere.

But DSA's broader program goes beyond simply reorganizing ICE.

Again, precision matters.

The same principle applies to the provocative headline asking how readers would feel about Ilhan Omar being deported.

Nothing in the Sanders-Omar police exchange provides a legal basis for deporting her.

Omar is a United States citizen. She fled Somalia as a child and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2000.

President Trump has repeatedly attacked her over her Somali origins, and in February 2026 he publicly said Omar and Representative Rashida Tlaib should be sent back to where they came from after a State of the Union confrontation.

That was political rhetoric. It was not a deportation order.

A U.S. citizen cannot simply be placed into ordinary removal proceedings because the president dislikes her politics.

For a naturalized citizen to become deportable, the government would generally first have to revoke citizenship through a denaturalization process. Federal law allows denaturalization in limited circumstances, principally when citizenship was illegally procured or obtained through concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation.

The Justice Department has significantly expanded denaturalization litigation during Trump's second term and has publicly filed cases against naturalized citizens it accuses of fraud or serious pre-naturalization misconduct.

But political disagreement, support for defunding police, membership in Congress or advocacy for abolishing ICE is not by itself a statutory basis for stripping a citizen of nationality.

That is why the deportation headline does not fit the article beneath it.

There is a legitimate debate over Omar's policing record.

There is a legitimate debate over DSA's influence on Democratic candidates.

There is a legitimate debate over whether Sanders is understating how much support radical institutional ideas have received on the left.

And there is a legitimate political controversy over Trump's repeated demands that Omar be sent out of the country.

Those are separate stories.

Combining them into one headline suggests a legal connection that the facts do not establish.

The more important story is what Sanders' remark tells us about the 2026 Democratic coalition.

He is attempting to separate economic democratic socialism from abolitionist movement politics.

That distinction has always existed to some degree. Sanders' socialism has historically focused heavily on wages, health care, unions, taxation, economic inequality and universal social programs. He has often been more cautious than activist organizations on cultural and criminal-justice slogans.

But DSA's growing visibility forces the distinction into the open.

The organization's 2026 platform openly imagines a new constitutional structure and a far more sweeping transformation of immigration, policing, incarceration and corporate ownership than the average Democratic officeholder advocates.

That makes Sanders' job difficult.

If he attacks those positions too aggressively, he risks alienating activists and candidates energized by a movement that sees him as one of its ideological predecessors.

If he pretends the positions do not exist, Republicans can simply play the clips.

His answer on Pod Save America attempted a third route.

He said the right exaggerates fringe positions and insisted that serious candidates do not actually support them.

Omar's response exposed the weakness in that strategy.

The record is too recent to deny.

A serious member of Congress from Minneapolis supported replacing her city's police department with a different public-safety structure in 2021.

A serious candidate for Wisconsin governor has previously used explicitly abolitionist language about police.

The current national DSA leadership openly supports major institutional abolition as a long-term program.

Those facts do not mean every Democrat supports those ideas.

They mean the political left is genuinely divided over them.

Sanders is on one side of that divide more often than his critics sometimes acknowledge.

Omar has occupied a different position at different moments.

In Minneapolis after George Floyd, she embraced structural change far beyond conventional police reform.

In 2026, when asked whether Sanders was wrong, she emphasized context, public safety and the absence of enacted legislation.

That is not necessarily a complete reversal.

It is an example of how political language changes after movements collide with elections and governing reality.

The same evolution has happened across the country.

Some activists still believe abolition should remain the long-term goal.

Some progressives support shifting functions and money away from armed policing without using the word "defund."

Some Democrats support reforms but reject budget cuts.

Others want more police funding combined with tougher accountability standards.

Putting all of them into a single ideological category produces bad analysis.

Pretending the abolitionist category never existed produces bad analysis too.

The most accurate conclusion sits between the partisan versions.

Sanders is correct that Republicans frequently amplify the most controversial position on the left and attribute it to Democrats who never endorsed it.

He is too categorical when he says no serious candidate supports defunding police.

Omar is correct that Minneapolis had an unusually specific and traumatic reason to debate a different public-safety model.

Her answer also avoids the fact that she herself supported replacing the police department and that the proposal went before voters in 2021.

DSA's critics are correct that the organization currently advocates several sweeping institutional changes that go well beyond mainstream Democratic policy.

They are wrong if they imply every Democratic candidate is bound to every DSA plank.

And a headline about deporting Omar has essentially nothing to do with the substance of this particular exchange.

She is a naturalized American citizen and member of Congress. Any attempt to strip that citizenship would require a separate legal process and legal grounds, not a disagreement over policing.

That distinction may be less sensational than asking readers whether they want a controversial lawmaker deported.

It is also the distinction the Constitution requires.

The real 2026 political fight is not whether Ilhan Omar can be removed from the country because of something she said about police six years ago.

It is whether Democrats can define the boundaries of their own coalition before Republicans define those boundaries for them.

Sanders is telling voters that socialism does not mean abolishing police, prisons or borders.

DSA leaders are openly saying some of those changes remain part of their long-term vision.

Omar is trying to explain how a movement that once used more radical language can now talk about safer communities without pretending 2020 never happened.

That tension is real.