Michigan’s Democratic Senate Frontrunner Called for the Mass Release of Prisoners. Here’s the Tape.
The Democratic frontrunner for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat once sat on a “prison abolition” webinar and endorsed “any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons.” The event was billed, in its own promotion, as “the road to decarceration and abolition” — hashtagged #FreeThemAll and #AbolishPrison.
The candidate is Abdul El-Sayed (D), the former Wayne County health director and 2018 gubernatorial candidate now leading a three-way Democratic primary. On the 2020 webinar he shared the panel with a woman convicted of second-degree murder and a registered sex offender convicted of raping a 17-year-old.
The footage resurfaced in the final weeks before Michigan’s Aug. 4 primary — in a Trump-won state, for the only open Democratic-held Senate seat on the 2026 map. El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment on the webinar.
- 24%primaryEl-Sayed's lead in the Democratic field — Emerson College Polling
- 34yearsserved for second-degree murder by one of his fellow webinar panelists — Free Beacon
- Aug 4primaryMichigan Democratic Senate primary; general Nov. 3 — Ballotpedia
- 0.3pointsGOP nominee Mike Rogers' 2024 loss margin in Michigan — a genuine toss-up
In the summer of 2020, El-Sayed was the featured guest on a webinar hosted by the University of Michigan’s Carceral State Project and the American Friends Service Committee, built around the advocacy group’s report “I Don’t Want to Die in Prison.” The organizers promoted it, in their own words, as a chance to discuss “the road to decarceration and abolition with Abdul El-Sayed,” under the hashtags #FreeThemAll and #AbolishPrison. That is the group’s framing, reproduced verbatim — not an opponent’s characterization.
El-Sayed endorsed, in his own words, “any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons,” and said the government should be “investing” in exactly that. His frame was not that specific inmates had been wrongly convicted; it was that incarceration itself is the wrong response to social problems.
“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.”
Abdul El-Sayed (D) · prison-abolition webinar, 2020 · as reported by the Washington Free Beacon and Fox News
Part of El-Sayed’s argument leaned on the moment: overcrowded prisons were a COVID-19 health risk, he noted, and releasing inmates would reduce transmission. But he did not confine the case to the pandemic. According to Fox News Digital’s account of the recording, he endorsed continuing to empty correctional facilities after the emergency passed — decarceration as a permanent policy, not a public-health stopgap.
The venue: a webinar an abolition group promoted as “#FreeThemAll” and “#AbolishPrison,” centered on a report titled I Don’t Want to Die in Prison.
The endorsement: “any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons,” with a call to be “investing” in them.
The frame: jails and prisons as a “stopgap” for a society that “has failed to deal with real problems.”
The accuracy note: El-Sayed is describing a policy direction — decarceration and abolition — in his own recorded words. We quote him precisely rather than inflate “get people out of jails and prisons” into a claim he did not make.
El-Sayed did not deliver these remarks in the abstract. He shared the webinar panel with two people the abolition movement holds up as its cause. According to the Washington Free Beacon, one was LaWanda Hollister, who served 34 years in prison for second-degree murder. The other was Martin Vargas, a registered sex offender convicted of raping a 17-year-old girl. El-Sayed cast the panelists as people the system had wronged, not as a warning about who “mass release” actually returns to the street.
The webinar was not a one-off. Months earlier, in an April 2020 episode of the Decarceration Nation podcast, El-Sayed appeared with host Joshua Hoe — a former University of Michigan debate coach who pleaded guilty in 2010 to soliciting a 14-year-old girl for sex online, served roughly four years, and is a registered sex offender. On that episode, El-Sayed encouraged people with criminal records to seek public office, telling them: “We need your voice… folks who are affected by the experiences that you’ve had uniquely need your voice.”
El-Sayed urged the mass release of prisoners and touted 'decarceration' in a webinar promoted as #FreeThemAll and #AbolishPrison — seated alongside a convicted murderer and a registered sex offender. The recording was public the whole time.
“Decarceration” and “prison abolition” are not rhetorical flourishes; they are defined policy programs. Decarceration means releasing incarcerated people at scale and substituting non-prison penalties — supervision, treatment, restorative programs — for confinement. Abolition, its more radical sibling, aims to eliminate prisons and police as institutions. The webinar El-Sayed headlined was explicitly about both, under a banner reading #FreeThemAll.
The distance between slogan and consequence is the whole story. “Any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons” is a clean sentence on a webinar. Applied as policy, it necessarily includes people convicted of violent crimes — because the American prison population is disproportionately made up of them. That is not a hostile gloss; it is what the panel itself modeled by seating a convicted murderer and a convicted rapist beside the candidate as sympathetic examples.
“We need your voice… folks who are affected by the experiences that you've had uniquely need your voice.”
Abdul El-Sayed (D), urging people with criminal records to run for office · Decarceration Nation podcast, April 2020
None of this is disqualifying as a matter of law — El-Sayed is a candidate stating a policy view, not a defendant. But voters weighing a U.S. Senate seat are entitled to know that the frontrunner’s recorded position on incarceration is not “reform the margins.” It is “get people out,” framed by the movement whose stage he chose to stand on.
The prison-abolition tape did not surface in a vacuum. In November 2025, CNN’s KFile reported that El-Sayed had quietly scrubbed thousands of old social-media posts — including roughly a dozen that championed the “defund the police” movement and described police departments as “standing armies.” The Free Beacon separately reported that he had served on the board of a group that lobbied to “defund” and “abolish the police.”
One June 2020 post, preserved before deletion, read: “Most major US cities spend WAY TOO MUCH on police departments to police poverty & WAY TOO LITTLE on public schools, health departments, recreation departments, & housing to eliminate poverty. Fixing that is what the #Defund movement is about.” Confronted on CNN in 2026, El-Sayed said he had deleted the posts “because I didn’t want them to be taken out of context,” and asked to be judged “by actions,” not old tweets.
Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is confronted over deleting his 'defund the police' posts and dodges on whether Israel has a right to exist during a tense on-camera interview.
The through-line is not a single tweet. It is a candidate who took strong abolition and defund positions on the record in 2020, then deleted the paper trail as he moved toward a statewide general election — and whose deleted words keep resurfacing anyway, on video he cannot delete.
The stakes are why this footage matters beyond one primary. Sen. Gary Peters (D) is not seeking a third term, leaving an open seat. El-Sayed leads a fractured Democratic field over Rep. Haley Stevens (D) and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D) — but with roughly a third of primary voters undecided, and with El-Sayed positioned as the most progressive of the three, party strategists have openly worried about electability in a state Donald Trump carried in 2024.
Waiting in November is Republican Mike Rogers (R), the former U.S. House member and 2024 Senate nominee who lost to now-Sen. Elissa Slotkin by roughly three-tenths of a point — one of the closest Senate races in the country. This is the only open Democratic-held Senate seat up in a Trump-won state, which is precisely why national Republicans have flagged El-Sayed’s record early and often.
Abdul El-Sayed is too radical for Michigan: Medicare for All, abolish ICE, defund the police — and now a prison-abolition tape calling to 'get people out of jails and prisons.' This is the Democrats' frontrunner.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Truth Social · GOP Senate committee messaging, summer 2026 · paraphrased
El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment on the webinar. His broader defense, offered when pressed on the related defund posts, has been consistent: the clips are being weaponized, he says, and voters should judge him on what he would do, not on 2020-era language taken “out of context.” Readers can weigh that defense against his own recorded words — which is the point of publishing the words rather than the paraphrase.
Judge me by my actions, not by tweets I deleted so they wouldn't be taken out of context. Michiganders want leadership that fights for them — that's the conversation I'm having.
The Radical Left Democrats want to release dangerous criminals back onto our streets. Now their Senate frontrunner in Michigan is on tape demanding it. We will NEVER let them destroy the Great State of Michigan!
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Truth Social · President Trump on Democratic soft-on-crime politics · paraphrased
The accountability question here is narrow and fair. El-Sayed is not accused of a crime; he is a public official who chose, on the record, to headline an event promoted as “#AbolishPrison” and to endorse “any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons.” He is now the frontrunner to hold one of a hundred seats in the United States Senate, in a state that voted for the other party at the top of the ticket eighteen months ago. Whether “mass release” is a virtue or a liability is for Michigan voters to decide. Our job is to make sure they get to decide it with the tape, not without it.
