Judging Freedom - Coleen Rowley : An FBI Veteran Examines ICE Lawlessness.

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

Coleen Rowley : An FBI Veteran Examines ICE Lawlessness.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? Jefferson was right? What if that government is best, which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish

fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Monday, February 2nd, 2025. My guest today, who has been on the show before and who probably will be on many times to come as Colleen Rowley. Colleen is a former special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and she has kindly offered to give us some of her time today. Colleen, it's a pleasure. You and I have been friends for a long time going back to when I worked at Fox News, and you were kind enough to appear on the show that I was hosting at the time. I appreciate your time now.

I mean, not only are you a former FBI agent, but you are from and live in, of all places, Minnesota. So you really are most appropriate to be addressing the ICE immigration and customs enforcement to issues with us today. I'm reminded of that statement by President John Quincy Adams, we should not go abroad looking for monsters to slay. One of our on-air regular gas ambassador, Chas Freeman, has modified that by saying, when you go abroad looking for monsters to slay, they have a way of following you home.

Has American militarism abroad now manifested itself in the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul? Yes, Minnesota, which we always used to call Minnesota Nice, you know, something out of that old sitcom Andy Griffith of Mayberry. But unfortunately, when I was the legal counsel of the FBI office here for 13 years, I had a good chance to teach agents about the following the constitutional law, especially the law of criminal procedure, so that when the war on terror, which I actually were, was I put, I was one of the first people I put it in quotes when I wrote that memo that landed me on the cover of Time magazine. But when you saw this happening, I warned that that same thing that Chas Freeman just said, that the war powers would be turned on Americans in the form of loosened deadly force standards. And of course, with the wrongful, unlawful. shootings of actually there's more than the two Americans they shot also an immigrant apparently in the leg in between those shootings or before then so there's three shootings in Minnesota and so unfortunately

you hate to be right but that warning that I gave in February 2003 to FBI director Mueller who was then testifying to you know basically not telling the truth to Congress but trying to support the lies to start the war on Iraq. And I warned about this. The funny thing is many in the FBI said I was kind of crazy. They said, oh, no, we will never change the deadly force standards. And, you know, of course, they were solidly ingrained back in 2000, in the early 2000s. We trained with simulated screens. Shoot, don't shoot. And, you know, if you shot the wrong innocent person, you know, or could, or if you didn't shoot in time, you could be killed. So, I mean, all this training that has just literally gone up in smoke between legal lectures and actual

practical training. People didn't think it could happen, but it has. And now this weekend, they went on a bicycle ride for a memorial for Alex Pruddy. And they had, they wore yellow, kind of like emergency yellow vests that said in the back, big words, don't shoot me. So it's turned out that in Minnesota, you have to get one of these yellow vests that say, don't shoot me to feel a little safer. It's very, very sad. One of our chatters who calls him or herself Redneck Catholic says Colleen has been my hero for a long time. You've been a hero for a lot of people.

So big picture, big picture. Now, before we get into how it is never justifiable to shoot an unarmed person in the back, but big picture, what's wrong with ICE in Minnesota? Is it too many ICE agents? Is it the J.D. Vance nonsense that they think they have absolute immunity? Is it their militarization? Is it their uniform? is that they're covering their faces and hiding their names?

What's the big picture issue? You've probably named almost all of the root causes of this problem. When you recruit people and your ads, they should be taken off the air because they're basically advertising to hire people who will, for the money, the $50,000 bonus and only getting a few days. They only have to sit through 47 days of training, which, you know, people that want to be armed and go out and have this authority over the public, whatever, and be exonerated so that there's nothing considered to be an unlawful order, you know, which is what J.D. Vance said with, you have absolute immunity, which is completely legally wrong. And all of those things, of course, the militarization, dressing up like paramilitary with grenades. I mean, it's like tear gas grenades that our former head of ICE or Border Patrol in Minnesota.

He was like showing off by throwing these grenades at crowds. And then all the tactics that have been imported here through co-training with the Israeli IDF, which are tactics like breaking windows. You know, you see this in that first shooting where they're reaching in to try to open the door. At least one of them is saying to go. The other one is trying to reach in. And those tactics all come from the genocidal tactics being used in Gaza and in the West. Do ICE agents undergo training with or given by?

Israeli defense force personnel? Yes, you'll have to ask. Anthony Aguilar was in these areas, and he witnessed this, co-training. But I can tell you from my own personal experience that after 9-11, I was called within days by Israelis telling us that now we had to, we had to now use all of the tactics that Israel uses. This is before they announced a war on terrorism. This is even beforehand, literally within days of 9-11.

I got a series of calls from either A-PAC people or Israelis themselves telling the FBI saying, you know what, you've got to now use the same tactics that Israel uses. And I remember one of the things was you've got to get attack dogs and dogs to sniff out bombs. That was one of the things they advised. And then very shortly afterwards, Israeli often. came and gave talks to our police departments and to the FBI here. And these talks were the same thing. You know, you've got to, you know, wake up people. You can't be nice anymore. You can't follow laws. You have to do what we do. One of the talks that I objected to, even at a law school, was by Israelis, was this thing that Dershowitz put out about you have to use torture tactics because of the ticking time bomb. And this talk would go like ends justify the means. There's a ticking time bomb in New York and you caught the guy who knows where the bomb is and therefore you're allowed to torture. And I heard this talk from coming

from Israeli sources many times even in a law school in Washington, D.C. And in course, Dershowitz amplified it and guess what we got. So there's been many examples of appropriating these things. But yes, ICE has actually been sent over there to train with IDF, and that's according to Anthony, former colonel, Anthony Aguilar, Green Beret Colonel. One of your big fans, I think you know him, John Carriaco, who is the only CIA officer that we know of who went to jail involving torture. Obviously, he went to jail, not for torturing, but because he revealed the torture Sharon named the names of the people who did it.

John is a longtime friend of mine. John's been on the show, and John, of course, will testify how it doesn't work. People will say whatever they think the torturer wants to hear in order to stop what's going on. One of the things that's intrigued me, and this is so, so violative of the Fourth Amendment, that a high school social studies student would know it,

is the concept of an administrative warrant, the idea that one ICE agent can sign an arrest warrant authorizing another ICE agent to arrest. Nobody's named everybody working at such and such a shop at 8.30 in the morning. Everybody working at such and such a car wash working at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. The Fourth Amendment requires warrants issued by federal judges based on probable cause of crime, specifically describing the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized. Who would trust one agent to authorize another? Yeah, and you know, it's similar to now the Department of Homeland Security claiming that no other law enforcement agency or state authority, can investigate a violation of murder.

They are going to, up till now, they claim they're allowed to investigate their own. And of course, this is ludicrous in light of the fact that the, no, Christy Knoem, the head person, and Vance and others have said prejudged without factual investigation at all, without any, and without, of course, any legal process, any evaluation. by a jury, by a prosecutor, by a jury. And they've tried to say that you have complete immunity, and we will protect all of the ICE agents involved.

I'm just going to add a little bit to that prior question you had about how this, the root causes of this, the protection, or the protection that the agents, the ICE agents have been made to believe they have in order to follow. all these unlawful orders. And one of the things from the start that the Trump administration wanted was quantity over quality. So even though in their campaign, they promised to quote unquote target the worst of the worst, i.e., you would think people with serious criminal histories, they sent 3,000 ice agents here and told them they want the numbers, not necessarily the fact that these were the worst of the worst. And just as an aside, with the release of the Epstein files,

we can very much question who is the worst of the worst right now, who is in terms of criminal backgrounds and whatever. But what happened then is when they got into trouble, they had to protect them. Otherwise, they could not keep this experiment going in Minnesota, which by the way, only as a fraction, only as a small fraction of immigrants compared to states like Texas, Florida, and even California. So why was Minnesota picked? It wasn't picked because of an immigration problem compared to other places in the United States. But in any event, to keep this going, they had to use this protection. And besides claiming that they will be protected legally and allowing the agency to investigate their own. They protect the identities. So immediately the agents who are the

shooters were moved out of Minnesota so that the Minnesota state authorities could not gain jurisdiction over those. You know what that's called? That's called obstruction of justice by barring people who are constitutionally authorized and obligated to investigate crime, state officials from having access to the evidence. That's right. And it was said, and actually people were getting this wrong all over the map. They were citing the supremacy clause. And I tried to lecture to some reporters. I said, you know, J. Edgar Hoover didn't even have criminal jurisdiction. When the FBI was formed, they had to create the law about taking women over a state line to give him a little bit of jurisdiction. FBI agents weren't even armed. And why? Because there were was no criminal jurisdiction. So it's we've come a long way now. We're now the the federal government under the so-called imperial presidency is allowed to say that states no longer can prosecute murder. It's if a federal officer is involved. And as you rightfully noted in the, in your, one of your

recent articles about the FBI sniper Lon Horiucci who got into trouble shooting Weaver's wife. Of course, he wasn't intending to shoot Weaver's wife, but what he was given was an unlawful order. Very few people remember this aspect. But for a period of time, the FBI dissembled, let's say, let's say, they dissembled as to where this order had come from that now that Ruby, there had already been shooting of the marshal. And so because of that, one of the FBI officials, second in command of the FBI said, now you can shoot any armed mail on site. That order was given. It was covered up for a period of time. And this got the poor sniper into terrible trouble because he was, the county attorney charged him with murder. Now, eventually the county attorney was persuaded

to drop the charges, but this wasn't, didn't come until after at least a couple of years. And I definitely you recall, you know, what that does is that gives a measure of accountability so that agents then are not told they have the green light to do something like this unlawful order said. How can Christy Noem and J.D. Vance and Greg Bovino and Tom Homan, although I've never actually heard this out of Homan's mouth, I have out of the others, claim that shooting Alex Pretty in the back nine times when they had already seized his gun, when they had blinded him with pepper spray, and when he was on one leg and one knee crouched down, there you can see the picture. How could they possibly justify that?

Well, if I was arguing on the other side, I think the only argument is that, what is it, Connor Graham tests that says you only have a split second to make a decision. So that would be the strongest argument that the shooters will have, that they misunderstood. Let me hear the Colleen Rowley argument. Well, I've lectured that the state now, they are holding off of doing this, But because they were not given access to the site, to the crime scene, they weren't given access, of course, to the shooters to get their statements. However, the videotapes are the best evidence. And there are also eyewitness accounts in affidavits. So I have been saying, and I'm not the only one, prominent defense attorneys have said the same thing,

that the Attorney General in Minnesota should take this. the videotapes to the grand jury. They should stop them at key points, ideally, with a forensic, ballistic, deadly force expert. And especially the one in Alex Pretty, which shows both of his hands. And neither hand has a gun, and they're out in front of him. And, you know, with five or six people pummeling him at the same time and then beginning to shoot him. So those are the key videotapes. They are the best evidence. And I think they should seek murder charges because I think despite this cosmetic change of taking Bovino out and replacing him with the kindly grandpa rumpled, the guy that isn't

wearing the paramilitary Holman, I think it's cosmetic. I don't think much is going to change. But what could change that people understand? And this is for the people, the ICE agents. This is for on their behalf because what happens is people who are following unlawful orders are the ones hang out to hung out to dry. Christy Noam won't be hung out to dry for saying what she said or Stephen Miller saying, oh, the law is like old fashioned, we don't have to follow the law anymore.

They won't be held accountable. Typically in all of these situations, you can look at Milai, you can look at Ruby Ridge example and you will find that the person who is the one executing or thinking they had the green light to execute an unlawful order is going to be the ones held responsible that was out of abu grave the orders came from on high that the people were told to do these things and guess who went to prison uh little sergeants at the bottom so i think that the way to curtail it is for our state now to use the legitimate jurisdiction they have and take the evidence, even though they don't have access to everything before the grand juries, because this will now make a, this will give a

lesson to the, to the ice potential ice shooters. And it's not, by the way, it's not just shootings. As you mentioned, there's a lot of civil rights violations of the Fourth Amendment, breaking down doors, hauling even American citizens out into the below zero temperatures in their underwear. A lot of beatings, a lot of beatings. Over the weekend, more people were still arrested. Even I know of a veteran that's still being held in federal custody that was protesting, obviously, ice. So the people at the level that are actually on the ground need this legal lecture. need this legal lecture right now. They weren't, obviously, they were given the opposite. And so

what kind of, what kind of a screening does ICE do? It can't, can't come close to the screening the FBI does before it hires special agents. Yeah. You know, I had a year and a half of screening. And they went back to my teachers in high school and my roommates in law school and the people that lived next to me. Oh, my gosh. Then we actually had to pass physical fitness test. We had to, what else would? Oh, I had to go through this interview. But it, from the time I applied to the time I was hired was about a year and a half. And it was very extensive. They do check in to everything. I honestly, and I wasn't given $50,000. So you were incentivizing people for wrong, for wrong reasons. So if you're joining law enforcement, as you know, this is a public service and you should

not be doing it for the money or because someone says, oh, we'll give you an arm, we'll give you an automatic weapon and all these, these weapons and you'll get to use your authority. I hate to even mention this, but I've done a lot of psychology studying, especially about serial killers. And one of the things that they will notice, behavioral scientists will always notice is that there's an overlap between serial killing and the law enforcement security work because you're seeking to gain a position of authority over others. And obviously for the wrong reasons, not for the reason of law enforcement per se. Well, what can we do about this, Colleen, other than demonstrating in the streets? Congress is missing in action. There are some members of Congress who are courageous.

There's legislation, for example, to force ICE to identify themselves and take their masks off. Almost all Republicans in the House will oppose it. if two or three vote for it with all the Democrats, it'll pass, and it will certainly pass in the Senate. That's a little cosmetic, although it is terrifying to see these guys with masks on. The culture needs to change. The attitude of them versus us needs to change. The militaristic aspect of it needs to change. Absolutely. The militarization, is largely based upon a war zone mentality. If you remember the name of the book about Vietnam,

it was Nick Tursa's book. It was entitled, Shoot Anything That Moves. And of course, that applies. It shouldn't have, and it should actually be a war crime in Vietnam and other places. However, that mentality has now morphed through all of this lauding, over 20 some years now of our wars and our military and constantly lying about the enemy that we need to use preemptive force on, preemptive invasion, preemptive assault. This was why it was very obvious from the start that if you start launching preemptive wars that turn out not to be justified at all, that that will, that mentality will morph back to the United States and give rise. to unlawful actions on the part of law enforcement.

But you're actually right. Here's some hope. I got some hope here. And it is in that third branch, the judiciary. Congress, before I get to the judiciary, their promise to withhold funding for DHS unless significant reforms are made. And the level of the significant reforms,

It's more than just taking a mask off. I mean, there's a lot of things that should be done to reform. And you would hope that Congress would hold to that promise that they made and would insist on very significant reform. Number one, scaling it back in order to do what Trump even promised, which was targeting the worst of the worst of people with serious criminal histories as opposed to people who have lived here for 20 years, working hard, Social Security, et cetera. Very different. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things in that reform.

We're going to have to wait and see if that happens. I'm not as hopeful with Congress for a lot of reasons, but our judiciary here in Minnesota has been, and I think other places, has been doing a decent job. They've released, there's been 500 and some rits of habeas corpus, which by the, in one month, which is more than an entire year's worth of criminal cases ever brought in Minnesota. And they've released people that were wrongfully detained. They are listening to arguments brought by Minnesota authorities. And I think there's a chance that are judges now. It's hard for the judges to assume responsibility too and such a lawless thing.

But what I keep, and you'll remember this quote, Justice Brandeis, It's the number one thing. I mean, the smartest thing that any judge has ever said, I think in the 1920s or something under this Olmsted. You're talking about his descent in Olmstead. Go ahead. I'll let you say it. Well, I'm going to butcher it.

So maybe you'll correct me. But it's basically goes when the government becomes the wrongdoer, it breeds contempt for the law. And that leads to anarchy. You're 100% correct. And that's where we are. today, the government is the wrongdoer. One of the worst statements in this whole morass has been J.D. Vance. I have nothing against him personally or even politically, but for him to say to them, you have absolute immunity and then not to correct himself when he knows a Yale law school

graduate, when he knows under the law that he's wrong, he has unleashed these monsters with a false sense of legal security. Colleen Raleigh, it's a pleasure, my dear friend. Would you come back and visit with us again? I hope there's not another killing, but I hope you can come back and visit with us. Maybe after there are some judicial rulings that are gratifying or, please, Lord, the Congress does the right thing. Exactly.

Thank you so much for having me. And I just hope I crossed my fingers, but we got also the mass epidemic of shootings, which is also what Brandeis warned about, exactly. Yes. Thank you so much, Colleen. All the best to you. Great, a great lady. Tomorrow Tuesday, Ambassador Chas Freeman at 8 in the morning,

Professor Jeffrey Sachs at 10 at 1 o'clock, Aaron Mote, at 2 o'clock, Matthew Ho, at 3 o'clock. Colonel Karen Koukowski at 4 o'clock, Scott Ritter. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.