Sen. Tommy Tuberville is predicting that New York City’s socialist mayor could talk — or act — his way straight into America’s most notorious military prison.
The Alabama Republican tore into Mayor Zohran Mamdani during a Thursday interview with conservative commentator Benny Johnson, warning that the Democrat would eventually cross a line that forces federal authorities to act.
“For some reason, we have enough people in New York that would vote for this guy to run the largest and the most popular city in the world,” Tuberville said, according to The Hill. “It just goes to show you how close we are to losing our country.”
Tuberville then took his prediction much further.
“He will, 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,” the senator declared.
“The guy hates this country, he wants to change it and that’s not going to happen,” he added.
“Gitmo” is the widely used nickname for the detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The prison has housed terrorism suspects since the early years of the War on Terror and has long faced accusations of abuse and torture.
Tuberville did not identify a specific crime he believes Mamdani committed, and a senator does not have the authority to order someone’s arrest or transfer to Guantanamo Bay. His comments appear to have been a dramatic warning about where he believes the mayor’s increasingly provocative agenda could lead.
The blistering remarks came just days after President Donald Trump stepped into another explosive Mamdani controversy — this one involving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mamdani had been exploring whether he could order the New York Police Department to arrest Netanyahu when the Israeli leader travels to Manhattan for the United Nations General Assembly in September.
“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani told The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast, calling the Israeli leader a “war criminal.”
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu in 2024 over alleged war crimes in Gaza. Netanyahu and the Israeli government have rejected the allegations, while neither the United States nor Israel recognizes the court’s jurisdiction.
Trump responded with a blunt promise that Mamdani would not get his way.
“Benjamin Netanyahu will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, according to The Guardian.
The president said Netanyahu was fighting Iran and argued that “the only ones that should be arrested are the people that led Iran into this unprecedented spiral of death and destruction.”
Mamdani ultimately acknowledged that City Hall did not have the power to carry out the ICC warrant. But he refused to abandon the fight, instead calling on the Trump administration to join the court and arrest Netanyahu itself.
“It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant,” Mamdani said in a video posted Tuesday. “The federal government, however, does — and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant.”
That demand had virtually no chance of gaining traction inside the Trump White House. Trump signed an executive order in 2025 declaring that the ICC has no jurisdiction over the United States or Israel and denouncing its warrants against Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant as “illegitimate and baseless.” The order also authorized sanctions against officials involved in targeting Americans or citizens of allied nations.
Thursday’s blast was not the first time Tuberville and Mamdani have collided.
Earlier this year, Tuberville shared an image contrasting Mamdani’s Ramadan iftar at City Hall with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The image carried the message, “The enemy is inside the gates.”
Mamdani, New York City’s first Muslim mayor, condemned the post as “bigotry.” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer called it “mindless hate,” while California Gov. Gavin Newsom branded Tuberville “a racist piece of s—.”
Tuberville did not back down, maintaining that his criticism was aimed at radical Islam rather than Muslims generally.
The former Auburn football coach is now the Republican nominee for Alabama governor after winning the May primary with more than 85 percent of the vote. The Trump-endorsed senator will face Democrat Doug Jones in November, setting up a rematch of their 2020 Senate contest. Tuberville is widely reported to be heavily favored in the deep-red state.
For national Republicans, Mamdani has rapidly become the poster child for the Democratic Party’s socialist wing. For Tuberville, the mayor’s attacks on Netanyahu and clashes with the Trump administration are apparently evidence that New York’s leftward experiment is heading somewhere dangerous.
Maybe even, in the senator’s telling, all the way to Gitmo.
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