Sands started a career in acting in 1987, appearing in several episodes of the TV Series "The Bold and the Beautiful". In 1988 and 1989 she appeared in two movies, including Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell. Sands worked as a chiropractor in private practice from 1990 to 1999. In 1999 Sands married real estate mogul Fred Sands. Following his death in 2015, she became the chair and CEO of Vintage Capital Group, which has around $150 million in assets, and of Vintage Real Estate. In 2016, Sands donated nearly a quarter million dollars and organized high-dollar fundraisers for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. She also gave $100,000 to PresidentDonald Trump's inaugural committee. Sands was the 2016 California Delegate for the 33rd Congressional District to the 2016 Republican National Convention.
Sands was confirmed by the United States Senate to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark on November 2, 2017. She formally assumed the office on December 15, 2017. In December 2019, she caused controversy by vetoing the presence of Stanley Sloan, a scholar of the NATO alliance, at a Danish Atlantic Council conference that was meant to celebrate the 70th anniversary of NATO and discuss its future. On December 1, Sloan had received a formal invitation to give the keynote address at the conference from both Sands and the head of the Council, Lars Struwe. Later, Sands objected to Sloan speaking reportedly because she had seen him criticizing Donald Trump on Twitter during the NATO meeting of December 3-4, 2019. As a result of Sands' intervention, the Danish Atlantic Council disinvited Sloan on December 7 and the next day cancelled the conference entirely. Struwe wrote to Sloan that "knowing that you do criticise the President of the United States, we believe that Freedom of Speech is paramount in every democracy, and we do not see a conflict between the Freedom of Speech and participating as a Speaker at an international conference." The U.S. Embassy account on Twitter said that the "proposed last-minute inclusion" of Sloan into the conference did not comply with the “agreement that we followed when recruiting all other speakers.” The Embassy offered no proof of that allegation, however, and Struwe denied that such a process had even existed. When all the other speakers for the conference were being selected, Struwe said the U.S. Embassy had played no role in choosing them or in confirming whether they would attend the conference. The decision to disinvite Sloan was made on the morning of December 7, 2019; Sloan mentioned on Twitter that he was leaving soon to speak at the Copenhagen conference, which the Danish Atlantic Council retweeted, and then three hours later Sloan announced again on Twitter that he had just been disinvited. Sloan responded affirmatively when other scholars tweeted that Carla Sands would not have known anything about his scholarship and must have received "guidance" from Washington to veto his inclusion.
