Mostly False: Mike Rogers says Abdul El-Sayed supports defunding police and emptying prisons

In the high-stakes Michigan race for U.S. Senate, Republican Mike Rogers is accusing his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, of supporting policies that could compromise people’s safety while simultaneously portraying himself as “tough on crime.”

In a Sept. 23 X post, Rogers said El-Sayed “supports defunding the police and emptying prisons.” His post included an ad, which is running on TV and digital platforms in the Detroit market, in which a woman says she doesn’t trust El-Sayed with her four children’s safety. 

“Is this guy for real?” the woman says after a clip of El-Sayed talking about releasing people from jails and prisons.

Abdul El-Sayed supports defunding the police and emptying prisons.

Michigan families can’t afford his pro-crime policies. pic.twitter.com/WVZV3UIEu0

— Mike Rogers (@MikeRogersForMI) September 23, 2026

El-Sayed said he supported defunding the police in the past, and spoke about reducing incarceration rates and prison sentences broadly. Rogers’ X post is written in current tense as if El-Sayed “supports” these positions now, while the ad uses past tense to describe El-Sayed’s statements. During his Senate campaign, El-Sayed has not supported defunding the police and said he wants to increase funds for certain aspects of policing. He has not called for emptying prisons.   

Rogers’ campaign spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet said El-Sayed’s recent positions backtrack on his past statements. “Now, his insulting disapproval of law enforcement is coming back to haunt him, so he’s lying to Michiganders,” she said.

As a Senate candidate, El-Sayed isn’t calling to defund police

In 2020, El-Sayed advocated several times for defunding the police, as the idea gained popularity among the Democratic Party’s left flank after a May 2020 video showed George Floyd’s murder while in Minneapolis police custody. Proponents of defunding the police argued that some law enforcement agencies were abusing their power and not keeping people safe. Some supporters called for moving some funds from police to social services, while others advocated for completely eliminating modern policing systems. 

“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,” El-Sayed said in a Detroit Public Radio interview in June 2020. He said he supported “investing less in police.” 

CNN reported that El-Sayed in 2020 posted about a dozen times on social media about defunding the police. The posts have since been deleted.

Rogers’ campaign pointed us to a 2024 episode of El-Sayed’s podcast during which he said America should “rethink policing” and suggested the “redeployment of civic resources away from punishment and toward public welfare.” 

In that episode, he also said: “Perhaps rather than invest so much money in buying military grade weapons to deploy into our streets, we might instead figure out how to deploy social workers to the scene of domestic disturbances.”

More recently, El-Sayed said he has a more “nuanced” position on police funding.

In a Sept. 19 campaign video, El-Sayed said, “We’ve got to fund all of the things we need. For some problems, that is going to be a person with a gun.”

“We’ve got to fund recruitment, retention, and retirement, so that we can actually get people from in the community,” he said. 

He has also said armed officers don’t need to respond to all mental health crises and the federal government should fund programs for responding to mental health-related emergencies and community programs to reduce violence.

“No, Abdul El-Sayed does not support defunding the police,” El-Sayed campaign spokesperson Cole Wozniak said in an email to PolitiFact. “As he’s consistently said, Abdul believes we absolutely need to fund law enforcement to identify, prosecute, and protect communities from violent crime.”

Rogers’ campaign also pointed us to El-Sayed’s calls during this campaign to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying it’s an attempt to eliminate a law enforcement agency. El-Sayed has called for abolishing ICE but said he supports continuing immigration and border enforcement. He said ICE is “about normalizing paramilitary force on our streets.” 

El-Sayed has not called for emptying prisons

Rogers’ ad includes a clip from a webinar El-Sayed spoke at in August 2020, called “I Don’t Want to Die in Prison,” which was organized by the University of Michigan’s Carceral State Project. During the event, El-Sayed and people who had been incarcerated discussed prison living conditions before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The speakers discussed a report about COVID-19 in prison that called for reducing prison populations.

El-Sayed said he supported reducing prison populations because COVID-19 spread easily in crowded jails and prisons. He also backed policies to reduce jail and prison populations even after the pandemic. 

“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,” he said. “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 to do.” 

During the webinar, an event organizer said the report said “the only humane response to the crisis of incarceration itself is abolition.” But El-Sayed didn’t say he wanted to “empty” or abolish prisons.

In recent campaign events, El-Sayed has said he opposes private prisons because he doesn’t think people should profit from imprisoning people. He supports investing in mental health services and job training for people leaving prison, to prevent reoffending.

At a Sept. 19 town hall, a corrections officer asked El-Sayed whether he wanted to release prisoners and decrease law enforcement in Michigan. El-Sayed said he wanted more money to help keep officers and prisoners safe.

“So the idea of somehow pulling back on folks like you is ridiculous,” he told the officer. “You need more people. That’s how you keep things safe.”

Our ruling

Rogers said El-Sayed “supports defunding the police and emptying prisons.” 

In 2020, El-Sayed called to defund police amid protests about police officers abusing their power. As he campaigns for the Senate, El-Sayed has spoken about increasing funds for police recruitment and retention, and said he supports more funding for mental health responses and violence intervention programs.

During the pandemic, he said prisons should release people to help lower the number of people becoming sick with COVID-19, and he said that should be extended after the pandemic. He did not say he wanted to empty prisons.

The statement contains an element of truth: El-Sayed previously supported diverting funding from police and spoke about releasing some prisoners amid the pandemic. But Rogers’ statement ignores that El-Sayed during his campaign has called for funding for police and he isn’t saying prisons should be emptied.

We rate the statement Mostly False.