On Thursday, July 23, 2026, Tommy Tuberville sat down for an interview with right-wing media personality Benny Johnson and said out loud that a sitting American mayor should be arrested and shipped to a military prison.

Here is what Alabama's senior senator said about Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City:

"Sooner or later, he will do something more stupid than what he's done, to where we'll finally say, 'Enough's enough,' go putting handcuffs on him and get him the hell out of here and send him to Gitmo."

He also called Mamdani a "thug," and said, "the guy hates this country, he wants to change it and that's not going to happen."

Read that first quote again slowly, because the most disturbing part is easy to miss.

Tuberville isn't accusing Mamdani of a crime. He's predicting one. Sooner or later he will do something. The senator is openly hoping an American citizen commits some future offense so the government can lock him up in Guantanamo Bay — and he never says what that offense would be.

Who he's talking about

Zohran Mamdani is not a foreign combatant. He is not a suspect. He is not accused of anything.

He is the 112th Mayor of New York City, sworn in on January 1, 2026, elected by the people of the largest city in America. He was born in Kampala, Uganda, and has been a naturalized United States citizen since 2018.

Guantanamo Bay is the offshore military prison the U.S. built to hold foreign terrorism suspects outside the normal court system — the place designed so that the people inside it don't get the protections the Constitution guarantees.

A United States senator just said an elected American mayor belongs there.

Not tried. Not convicted. Not charged. Just handcuffed and disappeared to an island prison because a senator doesn't like his politics.

That is not a policy disagreement. It's a sitting lawmaker floating the idea of throwing a political opponent into indefinite detention without a trial.

This is not the first time

If this were a one-off — a bad answer in a friendly interview — that would be one thing. It isn't.

Back in March 2026, Tuberville shared a post on X that put an image of the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers side by side with a photo of Mamdani sitting on the floor at a Ramadan iftar at City Hall. The caption on the image read: "Less than 25 years apart."

Tuberville added his own words: "The enemy is inside the gates."

Mamdani, who is Muslim, had been sharing a meal to break the Ramadan fast with New Yorkers. Tuberville's post treated that — a religious meal — as the moral equivalent of a terrorist attack that killed nearly 3,000 people.

The backlash was immediate. Mamdani's response was restrained:

"Let there be as much outrage from politicians in Washington when kids go hungry as there is when I break bread with New Yorkers."

Tuberville was given every chance to walk it back. He didn't apologize. Asked to explain himself, he said only: "I just go by his rhetoric."

So: in March he suggested a Muslim mayor sharing a meal was "the enemy." In July he said that mayor should be in handcuffs at Gitmo. That's not a gaffe. That's a pattern, and it runs in one direction.

This is a man asking to run a state

Here's why this matters for Alabama specifically, and not just for New York.

Tommy Tuberville isn't just finishing out a Senate term. He is the Republican nominee for governor of Alabama in the 2026 election. He is asking roughly five million Alabamians to hand him the most powerful office in their state.

A governor controls state law enforcement. A governor appoints officials, directs the National Guard, and decides how state power gets used against people. The question voters have to answer is a simple one:

Do you want that power in the hands of someone who thinks political opponents belong in a prison camp?

Because Tuberville has now told us, in his own voice, how he thinks about Americans who disagree with him. They're not opponents to be beaten in an election. They're "thugs" who "hate this country" and should be removed — "get him the hell out of here."

The record behind the rhetoric

This fits what Tuberville has already shown us about how he treats facts and fellow Americans.

He has claimed, without offering any evidence, that "four or five" of his own Senate colleagues "didn't legally win" their elections — attacking the legitimacy of the very body he serves in.

And while he talks about who really belongs in this country, Tuberville's own claim to belong in Alabama is being fought over in court. A lawsuit argues he hasn't met the state constitution's seven-year residency requirement to run for governor, citing things like a 2023 Florida driver's license and a homestead exemption on an Auburn home he wasn't added to until mid-2024 — despite saying he moved back in 2018. Tuberville denies it.

On July 9, 2026, a Montgomery County judge dismissed that lawsuit — but it's worth being precise about how. Judge Brooke Reid threw it out for lack of jurisdiction, and her order expressly did not address the merits. She wrote that her ruling doesn't mean the plaintiffs "are estopped altogether from seeking court resolution of Constitutional eligibility to hold office," and said she expects the Alabama Supreme Court to make the final call.

In other words: no court has yet decided whether Tuberville actually meets the residency requirement to be governor. The man questioning whether a duly elected American mayor belongs in America hasn't settled the question of whether he legally belongs on his own ballot.

Words from senators are not just words

It would be comforting to write this off as talk. It isn't just talk.

When a sitting United States senator says an elected official should be seized and sent to Guantanamo, he is telling every one of his supporters that this is a reasonable thing to want. He is moving the line on what's acceptable. He is telling Muslim Americans exactly how a senior member of Congress sees them.

And he is telling all of us that due process — the right not to be locked up without charges or a trial — is something he considers optional when the target is someone he doesn't like.

That protection isn't a favor the government does for us. It's the thing standing between every American and a cell.

Tuberville wants to be Alabama's governor. Alabamians deserve to know he said this.

Source

• "Sen. Tuberville says 'thug' NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani should be jailed at Guantanamo Bay", Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News, via the Hanford Sentinel.
• Remarks confirmed via The Hill's report of the July 23, 2026 Benny Johnson interview.
• March 2026 "enemy is inside the gates" post and Tuberville's refusal to apologize: Fox News, March 18, 2026.