U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Auburn) said Tuesday he has talked directly with President Donald Trump about how the White House put the National Guard on the streets of Washington, Memphis and New Orleans – and that Montgomery gets the same treatment if he wins the governor’s race three weeks from now.
“Oh, 100%,” Tuberville said on WVNN’s “The Dale Jackson Show” when asked how serious he is about a deployment. “There’s no life in Montgomery, Dale. If you ever get a chance, and I’m sure you’ll be there several times over the next year or so, just look down the street. There’s no life. It’s a dead city.”
“We’ve got to get our state capital back,” he said. “We’re going to do that, and if it takes several different measures that we have planned when we get elected, if we need to do that, one being the National Guard, we’ll do that.”
Tuberville said he went to Trump for the blueprint.
“I’ve even talked to President Trump about it, and I just talked to him about his plan of what he did to Memphis, what he did to New Orleans, what he did to D.C.,” he said. “How did you plan that? How did you structure, you know, discipline and protect the National Guard, even though they’re walking out on the streets in groups to get the cities back under control? I tell you what, it has worked perfectly. You hate to do something like that.”
Trump sent the Guard into Washington in August of last year and followed with Memphis and New Orleans.
Tuberville first floated a deployment to Birmingham and Montgomery in August 2025 and called the capital a “war zone” after last October’s downtown shooting that left two dead and 12 wounded.
Jackson said former U.S. Senator Doug Jones, the Democrat nominee, has “scoffed” at the idea that Birmingham and Montgomery are unsafe and described the Guard troops in Washington as “just planting flowers.”
Tuberville blamed Montgomery’s Democratic city government and its courthouse.
“Law enforcement has tried to do their job in some areas, but even when they get something done and put somebody in handcuffs, they go to the courthouse and they go in the front door, out the back,” he said. “There is no accountability, and when you have no accountability for any level of crime, it’s going to stack up on you. And at the end of the day, it’s going to snowball, and then people are going to say, ‘Listen, if they’re not going to do anything about it, I’m out of here.’ And that’s what’s happened to Montgomery.”
He said the judges will hear from him, and not just in the capital.
“I’ve talked to law enforcement in Montgomery, and they say, ‘Why would we give a ticket out for even a smaller crime?’ Because they go in the front door, out the back door. They go to these liberal judges,” Tuberville said.
“We got to hold everybody accountable, and I will call them out. I promise you that. And it just won’t be in Montgomery; it will be all over the state. If we have judges, I don’t care whether they’re Republican or Democrat, if they don’t hold people accountable in this day and time to get law and order back under control in our state, they’re going to have a tough time with me.”
“Criminals are not going to run this country. They’re not going to run this state.”
Tuberville also backed reviving State Sen. Will Barfoot’s (R-Pike Road) bill setting minimum police staffing levels for Montgomery and Huntsville.
SB298 passed the Senate in April and died on the House calendar on the final day of the session after Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed and Police Chief James Graboys lobbied against it.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re going to need to do that, Dale,” he said.
He said the state is “about 50% of what we really need” in law enforcement presence and promised to “recruit a new generation of law enforcement officers in the state.”
“Now we’ve got some good ones, but we need more. We need more funding. We need more training. We’re way behind in that as a total state,” Tuberville said. “We got to find some way to make sure that our streets are safe, because if we don’t, we’re not going to get manufacturing and new jobs come to the state of Alabama.”
Grayson Everett is the editor in chief of Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on X @Grayson270.
