Multiple ads airing in Michigan attack Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for past statements he made, or positions he held, about policing and prisons. But the ads either omit context or exaggerate his past policy proposals.
El-Sayed and his campaign have said he is not pushing to “defund the police,” as the ads claim or suggest. He spoke and posted in 2020 about wanting to reallocate some police funding to other community services, but has campaigned in the 2026 midterms on investing in “recruitment and retention and retirement” for law enforcement.
In addition, he never “called for abolishing prisons,” as one ad says. The claim is based on his participation in a 2020 webinar in which he said there was a need to reduce Michigan’s prison population during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Another ad that claims El-Sayed has a “plan” to “commute sentences for murderers and rapists” refers to a proposal from his unsuccessful 2018 campaign for governor of Michigan. His plan was to consider commuting prison sentences for individuals convicted as minors who were “deemed low risk” or who had served more than 25 years of “lengthy or life sentences.” He has not proposed doing that during his 2026 Senate run.
The ads, all from Republican-aligned groups, began airing in late September and claim or suggest that El-Sayed, a former Detroit public health official, is “dangerous” or would not “keep us safe.” He is running for the open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan against former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, an Army veteran who also worked for the FBI.
In the ad above, paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, a woman says, “I’m raising four children, and I don’t trust Abdul El-Sayed with their safety.” She adds, “El-Sayed supported defunding our police. Then he called for abolishing prisons and releasing criminals into our neighborhoods.” That’s followed by a video of him saying in August 2020, “Any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons.”
That same El-Sayed clip about releasing people from jails and prisons is shown in an SLF PAC ad that includes audio of him saying in June 2020, “I believe that we do need to defund the police.” In between those two snippets, a man in a police uniform says, “El-Sayed said it himself. He wants to defund the police and let criminals out of jail early.” “Defunding the police. Releasing prisoners. That’s just crazy,” another man in police gear says.
A third ad, from No Going Back PAC Inc., a super PAC linked to President Donald Trump, plays the same audio of El-Sayed talking about defunding the police. Then the narrator says, “It gets worse. El-Sayed’s plan calls for reducing sentence length. And not just reduce. El-Sayed’s plan says he’d commute sentences for murderers and rapists, letting violent criminals free.”
We’ll explain what the ads leave out about what El-Sayed has said on the topics of funding for police and reducing the prison population.
No More ‘Defund the Police’
El-Sayed did previously embrace elements of the progressive “defund the police” movement that began after George Floyd was killed in May 2020 by a police officer in Minneapolis. The featured audio clip of El-Sayed saying “we do need to defund” law enforcement is from a June 2020 radio interview with Jake Neher for Detroit’s NPR station. (Jump to 7:45 in the recording.)
El-Sayed’s fuller statement from the interview was: “I believe that we do need to defund the police insofar as defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets, and investing more in the means of educating and empowering, engaging communities.” He went on to say, “I like to talk about it as re-funding, right? I want to re-fund on the taxpayer dollars that I pay to police who use that to buy war materiel to wage war in our streets, and I want to re-fund public health and public libraries and public schools and the means of uprooting poverty.”
Earlier he said that investing more in social services, public schools and public libraries “means investing less in police.”
In July, CNN’s KFile, which reviewed El-Sayed’s past comments, said, “Throughout 2020, he repeatedly endorsed some of the movement’s goals in interviews, speeches and writings, often describing them as shifting government resources away from policing and incarceration and toward public health, education and anti-poverty programs.” The KFile analysis also found that he had deleted several of his old social media posts about defunding the police, which he later said he did because he “didn’t want them to be taken out of context.”
But while campaigning for the Senate this year, El-Sayed has talked about wanting to invest in – not defund – law enforcement.
“No, Abdul El-Sayed does not support defunding the police,” his campaign spokesperson Cole Wozniak told us in a statement. Wozniak added, “As he’s consistently said, Abdul believes we absolutely need to fund law enforcement to identify, prosecute, and protect communities from violent crime.”
In a July 2 CNN interview in which he addressed his deleted posts, El-Sayed explained his position this way: “Too often the conversation we have is fund or defund. The question that we don’t ask is, ‘What kind of system do we really want?’ I want us to be investing in the kinds of interventions that actually protect people, whether you’re talking about people on the streets or people in law enforcement. That means investing in recruitment and retirement for law enforcement. It also means investing in community violence intervention, investing in behavioral health response, investing in public health and anti-poverty measures. Those are things that are not mutually exclusive.”
And later that month, in a conversation with Politico, he said, “If we want really good law enforcement, we have to increase the amount of funds that we put into things like recruitment and retention and retirement, so that folks in local communities might want to actually work in law enforcement in their local communities.”
It’s also worth noting that the vast majority of funding for policing comes from local and state governments — not the federal government.
Not ‘Abolishing Prisons’
El-Sayed has not “called for abolishing prisons” or the blanket release of “violent criminals,” as some of the ads claim or suggest.
The clip of him saying “any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons” is from August 2020, when he participated in a webinar hosted by the Carceral State Project at the University of Michigan. He and the other two panelists, who were previously inmates, were discussing the Carceral State Project’s July 2020 joint report with the American Friends Service Committee, titled “‘I Don’t Want To Die in Prison’: Prison Conditions, Decarceration, and Mutual Aid in the Age of COVID-19.”
El-Sayed’s fuller comment was: “Any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons and to keep people out of jails and prisons is policy that we need to be investing in, particularly right now. But this doesn’t end when the pandemic’s over, right? We shouldn’t have to have a global pandemic to force us to find our humanity. This should just be what we do because it’s the right thing.”
He had been responding to a question about recommendations in the report that needed to be “enacted immediately” during the pandemic. He started his answer by agreeing with another panelist that the infirm and elderly should be considered for release from prisons because of the spread of COVID-19. But he went on to say “decarceration generally is really, really critical” because “there are so many ways that society has failed to deal with real problems and has used policing and jails as a stopgap for all of these failures.”
As we’ve written, President Donald Trump released more than 13,000 federal prisoners during the pandemic as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act that he signed in late March 2020. That legislation excluded releases for any prisoners convicted of violent crimes, sex offenses or terrorism-related crimes.
El-Sayed also made a point in the webinar about people “languishing in prison facilities who don’t need to be there” because of laws that keep them there for longer than necessary. He gave the example of people who remain in prison because they can’t afford to post bail while awaiting trial, and he mentioned the state’s “Truth in Sentencing” law that he said makes it hard to reduce minimum sentences for felony convictions.
“We’ve got to think about them all systematically,” he said.
But El-Sayed — who is against for-profit prisons — never said he favored “abolishing prisons.”
An Old Commutation Plan
The claim that El-Sayed’s “plan” is to “commute sentences for murderers and rapists” is another misrepresentation. It doesn’t reflect something he proposed during his current Senate run. According to a citation in the No Going Back PAC ad, it’s based on a proposal from El-Sayed’s failed 2018 campaign to be Michigan’s governor.
In a section on “Criminal Justice Reform,” the 2018 plan (on page 26) proposed repealing the state’s law that requires convicted felons to serve their entire minimum sentence before becoming eligible for parole. Repealing the law “would allow for more flexibility in sentence length based on the rehabilitation that occurs in prison,” it said.
“Additionally,” the plan said, “within the first term, the El-Sayed Administration would review the sentences of all prisoners sentenced before age 18 (nearly 4,000 as of March 2013) with the aim of commuting sentences for all prisoners deemed low risk, with credit for time served.” (A commutation doesn’t automatically mean an immediate release from prison. It could be a reduced sentence.)
Finally, the plan said El-Sayed’s administration would “explore commutation options” for individuals convicted as juveniles and serving more than 25 years, “in order to allow them a chance at freedom after serving more than their fair share of time.”
However, El-Sayed is not campaigning on that now.
In a Sept. 19 town hall, El-Sayed said that his 2018 plan was making the point that for a minor convicted of a petty crime instead of a violent crime, “that crime shouldn’t follow them the rest of their lives. That’s it.” Then he said, “The problem that we often have is that we police petty crime, but we don’t actually take on violent crime. And I’m just saying that if you put your hands on somebody else, if you violate their body, then you deserve to be held accountable for what you’ve done.”
Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of U.S. inmates are in jails or prisons run by state and local governments. While the federal government, including the Senate, can influence state and local policy, it has no direct control over state and local facilities, as the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative noted in a 2025 report.
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