[Rochester, Minn.] The Purple Heart-awarded triple-amputee, who stunned the Nation when he raised millions in private money to erect a border wall that blocked 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 lockup when he returns to the White House.

“I'd be grateful to whatever he could do to help to get me out of here,” said Brian Kolfage, who, as an Air Force senior airman deployed to Camp Anaconda, Iraq, was caught Sept. 11, 2004, in the blast radius of a mortar strike.

In that time, servicemen gave the installation, also known as Balad Air Base, the nickname “Mortaritaville.” 

After the blast, Kolfage’s buddies rallied to him, stuffing towels in his wounds until the Air Force ambulance arrived. This quick action saved his life, along with the good fortune of Balad having the top-tier military hospital in Iraq.

Now, two decades later, he is serving a 51-month-sentence after pleading guilty on April 26, 2023, to federal tax and wire fraud charges associated with his leadership of the We Build The Wall organization, which built a segment of steel and bollard barrier in Sunland, New Mexico, and contributed to the construction of a 4-mile barrier near McAllen, Texas.

Kolfage said he is incarcerated at the Federal Medical Center, Rochester, Minnesota, a facility operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, along with the terminally ill and the mentally deranged.

“It's a medical facility here, so they call it a hospital, but it's really adult daycare for elderly people who are dying,” he said. 

Kolfage said he was prosecuted by the same people who executed the lawfare against Trump.  

“The biggest thing is that this case is out of Southern New York in Manhattan, and there's no way someone like myself could win,” he said.

“The prosecutors and the judge seemed to me to be working together 100 percent; you could see it in with everything that was going on, and they weren't worried about the truth of this,” he said. “They just wanted to basically ruin me.”

Kolfage said he realized that there was no way to win against the Justice Department’s flagship field office, especially, he says, after prosecutors convinced Judge Analisa Nadine Torres to prevent him from mounting a full defense.

“They charged me with looting a nonprofit, which never happened, but they took it a step further to destroy my life by tacking on another $2.8 million fine,” he said. “I don’t know where they got that number from; it’s ridiculous.”

Kolfage: My physical health is failing as I serve this federal sentence

Kolfage said he is struggling to stay fit.

“I have pre-diabetes now,” he said. “I've been 100 percent healthy before I came in here, and it’s just sitting around doing nothing all day.”

The 42-year-old Detroit native said he has no way to exercise to keep up his strength, and there are restrictions on what he can take to help himself.

“They don't have anything for me to do to maintain my health, and they won't give me the proper medications, and they won't even allow me to take fish oil supplements to help with 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 it's just worse on me because I am severely disabled.”

“They're not; they're just 100 percent not equipped to handle a triple amputee who's lost as much as I have lost and has the difficulties of getting around and maneuvering around and doing things,” he said.

“There's a hospital—allegedly—so they have physical therapy,” he said. “They don't have anything that I can do in physical therapy to work out, to maintain my health, and things that I would do on the outside, and it's been detrimental to my health.”

Kolfage said he relies on his military training and discipline to get through his sentence.

“I call this place basic training with no training, and I'm just here taking up space,” he said. 

“I just take it a day at a time, and the hardest thing about this place is really just being away from my family and not getting the proper medical care that I need—and that's it,” he said.

Despite his notoriety, the triple-amputee said the medical and administrative staff at the facility are doing the best they can to support him.

“Everyone here, employees can't believe I'm here,” he said. “They're annoyed, and they’ve tried to help me along the way to do things to get out.”

Kolfage said both the facility’s doctor and warden recommended that he be released.

“It’s crushed down in Washington, D.C. when it hits The Swamp,” he said. 

“The Bureau of Prisons’ central office just denies everything. They submit all these documents, and they say: ‘This guy needs 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 to raise money to build the wall along the Mexican border on Dec. 16, 2018, and in a matter of 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, and I interviewed Kolfage and had conversations with him about the project.

As a favor to Kolfage, I had a conversation with two Republican leaders of the House Freedom Caucus to figure out a way to transfer the money raised to the U.S. treasury. Both men told me there was no way because all money coming into the federal coffers goes to the general fund, and only Congress can direct how it is spent.

It was not Kolfage’s plan to start up the organization We Build The Wall, but the option was forced upon him. The challenge was that GoFundMe would not transfer the donations to WBTW unless the donors agreed to transfer with an opt-in. 

Federal prosecutors conflated the initial GoFundMe project and the subsequent WBTW organization, arguing that Kolfage began his scheme to defraud donors in December 2018—despite his efforts to contribute funds to the treasury.

Remarkably, more than 90 percent of the donors actively approved the transfer to the new organization Kolfage created and was then leading for the purposes of a segment of border wall on the Mexican border.

Kolfage said the Border Patrol personnel asked him to build at the gap at Sunland between where the border wall ends at the Texas border with New Mexico and up to the top of an eastern peak that is just short of the top of the Sierra de Cristo Rey. The mountain is the host of the 42-foot-high statue of Jesus Christ erected in 1939.

The Border Patrol agents told Kolfage that they requested the barrier there, but the Army Corps of Engineers denied the request because the steep slope was itself a natural barrier.

When Kolfage spoke to the Border Patrol, they told him that the cartels had taken over the mountain and used it to dominate that part of the border. “They were up on top of that mountain on the United States side with AK-47s, controlling the traffic at the bottom, he said.   

“We wanted to give the Border Patrol the advantage—let them take control of the top of the mountain, make it their vantage point so that they could see the whole valley,” he said.

In addition to the wall, WBTW built a two-lane-wide asphalt-paved road along the wall up the slope, a paved parking lot, a tall flagpole for the American flag, and an observation tower, he said.

“We included sensors into the wall for anyone approaching from the outside of the wall. They would trigger the sensors, and Border Patrol would be alerted,” Kolfage said. “The motion sensors also trigger LED lighting up the entire mountain approaches.”

Kolfage said the wall itself was built on private property owned by a fighter pilot veteran of the Vietnam War.

The man’s parcel was open ground where he stored equipment and vehicles, he said. 

“He was elderly; he was telling us about all the incidences that happened on his property with his dog getting shot and killed, things stolen out of his truck, out of his house, out of his work, which was all on that site,” said the former senior airman, who volunteered for Iraq duty after serving in Kuwait.

“He told us he was being overrun by illegal migrants and other people who were coming across the border just to steal whatever he had on his property, and no one nobody was going to do anything to help this guy—no one cared.”