Sen. Bernie Sanders brought his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour to Detroit on Sunday, sharing a stage at Mumford High School with two Michigan Democrats whose policy wish lists read like a progressive fever dream: abolish ICE, establish Medicare-for-all, and, if past positions hold, strip funding from police departments.
The Vermont independent headlined the rally alongside Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate in Michigan's crowded Democratic U.S. Senate primary, and state Rep. Donavan McKinney, who is challenging incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar in the Democratic primary for Michigan's 13th Congressional District. Both candidates used the event to press their calls for dismantling U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and creating a single-payer health care system, Fox News Digital reported.
Sanders, for his part, made clear why he was there. He told the crowd the country needs leaders with a specific kind of spine.
"The guts to take on the political establishment of both political parties, to take on the oligarchs and economic establishment. That's why we need Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in the Senate."
That endorsement is not new territory for Sanders. He backed El-Sayed's 2018 gubernatorial bid, a race El-Sayed lost in the Democratic primary to Gretchen Whitmer. Now Sanders is doubling down on the same candidate, this time for a Senate seat, and bundling in McKinney for good measure.
El-Sayed hammered his policy positions during his remarks at the rally. The centerpiece: abolishing ICE and replacing private insurance with Medicare-for-all. McKinney, who spoke before Sanders took the stage, supports the same agenda.
For Michigan voters who care about border enforcement and immigration law, the "abolish ICE" plank is not an abstraction. ICE is the federal agency responsible for interior immigration enforcement, deportation operations, and investigations into transnational crime. Eliminating it would leave a gaping hole in the enforcement architecture, precisely the kind of policy outcome that rewards illegal immigration and punishes the communities absorbing its costs.
Sanders has long positioned himself as a champion of the working class. But backing candidates who want to dissolve the agency that enforces immigration law raises an obvious question: whose working class? American workers competing for jobs and housing in cities like Detroit, or the broader progressive coalition that treats enforcement itself as the problem?
That tension is not unique to this race. Sanders has drawn scrutiny before for the gap between his populist rhetoric and his conduct, and his willingness to campaign for candidates this far left suggests the contradiction is a feature, not a bug.
El-Sayed is not running unopposed. The Democratic primary field includes U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, both considered prominent contenders. Sanders' decision to plant his flag with El-Sayed is a deliberate factional choice, an attempt to drag the primary leftward by lending his national fundraising network and grassroots credibility to the most progressive option in the field.
It is the same playbook Sanders has run for years. He told the Detroit crowd as much, framing the rally in the context of a broader project.
"Over the last six, eight years, we have elected dozens of great members of Congress, strong progressives who are standing up and fighting for the working class. And I certainly hope that Donavan McKinney will join that group."
"Dozens of great members of Congress" is Sanders' way of describing the Squad-adjacent wing of the Democratic caucus, the faction that has pushed defund-the-police rhetoric, Green New Deal spending, and open hostility toward immigration enforcement into the mainstream of the party's left flank.
McKinney's primary challenge to Thanedar in the 13th District follows the same pattern: a younger, further-left candidate trying to unseat a sitting Democrat with Sanders' blessing. It mirrors the kind of intra-party conflict Sanders has stoked on other fronts, from energy policy to spending bills.
El-Sayed's political biography matters here. In 2018, Sanders endorsed him for governor. El-Sayed lost the Democratic primary to Whitmer, who went on to win the general election and become one of the most prominent Democratic governors in the country. That loss did not moderate El-Sayed's platform. If anything, the positions he is running on in 2026, abolish ICE, Medicare-for-all, are further left than what a statewide candidate in a swing state would typically risk.
Michigan is not Brooklyn. It is a state where auto workers, suburban parents, and rural communities have watched progressive governance up close. Running on abolishing ICE in a state that borders Canada and has real immigration enforcement concerns is a bet that the Democratic primary electorate has moved far enough left to reward it.
Sanders is making that bet with him. And he is doing it loudly, from a high school stage in Detroit, with cameras rolling.
The senator from Vermont has never been shy about picking fights within his own coalition. His "Fighting Oligarchy" tour is nominally aimed at billionaires and corporate power, but the practical effect is to elevate candidates whose policy positions put them at odds with the median American voter, and often with their own party's leadership.
The Sunday rally at Mumford High School was a campaign event, not a policy debate. No one on stage was pressed on how abolishing ICE would work in practice, what would replace it, or how Medicare-for-all would be funded without massive tax increases on the middle class. Those questions will come, or they should, as the Michigan primaries heat up.
For now, the picture is clear enough. Sanders flew into Detroit to boost two candidates who want to dismantle immigration enforcement and nationalize health insurance. He called it fighting oligarchy. Voters in Michigan will decide what to call it.
El-Sayed, McKinney, and Sanders are entitled to their platform. But Michigan voters are entitled to know exactly what that platform means: less enforcement, more government, and a Senate candidate who lost his last primary and came back with an even more radical agenda. Sanders has a long history of undermining figures in his own party when they fail to meet his ideological standards. The question is whether Michigan Democrats will follow him further left, or whether the primary voters will draw a line.
When a politician's answer to every problem is to abolish the agency, expand the program, and spend the money, the working class eventually figures out who gets the bill.
