[Rochester, Minn.] The Purple Heart-winning triple amputee who stunned the nation by raising millions in private money to build a border wall blocking a critical gap in the U.S. border with Mexico told RedState he would be grateful if President Donald J. Trump would release him from federal prison if he returns to the White House.
“I would be grateful for anything he could do to help get me out of here,” said Brian Kolfage, who, as a senior Air Force aviator at Camp Anaconda, Iraq, was caught in the blast radius of a mortar attack on Sept. 11, 2004 .
At that time, soldiers nicknamed the facility, also known as Balad Air Base, “Mortaritaville.”
After the explosion, Kolfage’s friends joined him and stuffed towels into his wounds until the Air Force ambulance arrived. This quick action saved his life and gave Balad the good fortune to have the premier military hospital in Iraq.
Now, two decades later, he serves one 51 month prison sentence After pleading guilty on April 26, 2023, to federal tax and wire fraud charges related to his leadership of the organization We Build The Wall, which constructed a segment of steel and bollard barriers and contributed to the construction of a building in Sunland, New Mexico 4 mile barrier near McAllen, Texas.
Kolfage said he was incarcerated with terminally ill and mentally disturbed people at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota, a facility run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
“This is a medical facility, so they call it a hospital, but it’s really an adult day care center for dying elderly people,” he said.
Kolfage said he was prosecuted by the same people who conducted the Trump trial.
“The most important thing is that this case is located in southern New York, in Manhattan, and there is no way someone like me could win,” he said.
“The prosecutors and the judge seemed to me to be working together 100 percent; you could see it in everything that was going on and they weren’t worried about the truth,” he said. “They basically just wanted to ruin me.”
Kolfage said he realized there was no way he could win against the Justice Department’s flagship branch, especially after prosecutors convinced Judge Analisa Nadine Torres to block him from mounting a full defense.
“They accused me of looting a nonprofit, which never happened, but they went a step further to destroy my life by fining me another $2.8 million,” he said. “I don’t know where they got that number from; it’s ridiculous.”
Kolfage: My physical health is deteriorating as I serve this federal sentence
Kolfage said he struggles to stay fit.
“I have prediabetes now,” he said. “I was 100 percent healthy before I came here, and that means sitting around all day and doing nothing.”
The 42-year-old Detroit native said he doesn’t have the opportunity to exercise to maintain his strength and there are restrictions on taking self-help medications.
“They have nothing for me to do to maintain my health and they don’t give me the right medications and they don’t even allow me to take fish oil supplements to lower my cholesterol and things like that,” he said.
“They don’t care — and the whole Bureau of Prisons is like that,” Kolfage said. “They just don’t do it to me. They do it to other people, but for me it’s just worse because I’m severely disabled.”
“They are not; They are just 100 percent not equipped to deal with a triple amputee who has lost as much as I have and has difficulty moving, maneuvering and getting things done,” he said.
“There’s supposedly a hospital, so there’s physical therapy,” he said. “They have nothing that I can do in physical therapy to exercise, maintain my health, and things that I would do externally, and that has had a detrimental effect on my health.”
Kolfage said he relied on his military training and discipline to get through his sentence.
“I call this place basic training without training, and I’m just here to take up space,” he said.
“I’m just taking it one day at a time, and really the worst thing about this place is being away from my family and not getting the proper medical care I need – and that’s all,” he said.
Despite his notoriety, the triple amputee said the facility’s medical and administrative staff are doing their best to support him.
“Everyone here, the staff can’t believe I’m here,” he said. “They got annoyed and tried to help me do things to get out.”
Kolfage said both the doctor and the facility director recommended his release.
“It is destroyed in Washington, D.C. when it reaches the swamp,” he said.
“The Bureau of Prisons headquarters simply denies everything. They file all these documents and say, ‘This guy has to get out of here.’ Washington just denies,” he said.
Kolfage founded We Build The Wall after raising more than $20 million
Kolfage launched his GoFundMe page on December 16, 2018 to raise money to build the wall along the Mexican border, and within weeks, “We The People Will Fund The Wall” raised more than $20 million.
At the time, I was a reporter for One America News in Washington, interviewing Kolfage and talking to him about the project.
As a favor to Kolfage, I had a conversation with two Republican leaders of the House Freedom Caucus to find a way to transfer the money raised to the U.S. Treasury. Both men told me that there was no way because all money that goes into the federal treasury goes into the general fund and only Congress can determine how it is spent.
It wasn’t Kolfage’s plan to create the We Build The Wall organization, but that option was forced upon him. The challenge was that GoFundMe would not transfer donations to WBTW unless donors agreed to the transfer with an opt-in.
Federal prosecutors have confused the original GoFundMe project and the subsequent WBTW organization, arguing that Kolfage began his scheme to defraud donors in December 2018 — despite his efforts to deposit funds into state coffers.
Remarkably, more than 90 percent of donors actively agreed to the handover to the fresh organization that Kolfage founded and then headed to build a section of border wall on the Mexican border.
Kolfage said Border Patrol personnel asked him to build at the gap in Sunland between the end of the border wall at the Texas-New Mexico border and to the top of an eastern peak that lies just before the top of the Sierra de Cristo Rey. The mountain is the host of the 12 foot elevated statue of Jesus Christ from 1939.
Border Patrol agents told Kolfage that they had requested a barrier there, but the Army Corps of Engineers denied the request, saying the steep slope itself was a natural barrier.
When Kolfage spoke to the border police, they told him that the cartels had taken over the mountain and used it to dominate this part of the border. “They were on top of the mountain on the U.S. side with AK-47s, controlling traffic below,” he said.
“We wanted to give the Border Patrol an advantage — let them take control of the top of the mountain and make it their vantage point from which they could see the entire valley,” he said.
In addition to the wall, WBTW built a two-lane paved road along the wall up the hillside, a paved parking lot, a elevated flagpole for the American flag and an observation tower, he said.
“We have sensors built into the wall to detect anyone approaching from outside the wall. They would trigger the sensors and alert the border guard,” Kolfage said. “The motion sensors also trigger LED lighting throughout the mountain access areas.”
Kolfage said the wall itself was built on private property owned by a combat pilot veteran of the Vietnam War.
The man’s property was an open area where he stored equipment and vehicles, he said.
“He was older; “He told us about all the incidents that happened on his property: his dog was shot, things were stolen from his truck, from his house, from his work, and it all happened on that property,” the former senior airman said , who volunteered for service in Iraq after serving in Kuwait.
“He told us that he was overrun by illegal immigrants and other people coming across the border just to steal everything he had on his property, and no one would do anything to lend a hand this guy – no one cared therefore.”
