Judging Freedom - Sheriff David Hathaway : Power Without Accountability — ICE Under Scrutiny

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

Sheriff David Hathaway : Power Without Accountability — ICE Under ScrutinySee 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, January 26, 2006. Our guest today is Sheriff David Hathaway. The sheriff, Hathaway is the sheriff of Santa Cruz County, Arizona. He is also a former supervisor of the drug enforcement administration, a lifelong career in law enforcement at the federal, state, and county level. Sheriff Hathaway, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for taking the time. to join us. Are state, county, and local law enforcement required to do whatever the feds want to actually work for the feds when they come into an area to enforce what they say is federal law? Well, unfortunately, Judge, many agencies take federal funds, and there's always strings attached.

There were various task force agreements when I came into office that required my deputy, to report to federal supervisors, to do the bidding of the federal supervisors as part of the requirements of taking those federal funds. So I have removed ourselves from my agency from receiving any of those federal funds. But when we look at the shootings in Minneapolis, one of the things that strikes me the most is,

you know, the founding father is intended for the police functions to reside with the states to prosecute things like homicide, assault, aggravated assault, robbery, sexual assault, rape, things like that. What happens on these shootings, and this has happened in my county too, I have two of the largest Border Patrol stations in the country in my county. What happens is if a federal officer gets involved in a shooting, they cordon off the area, and they will not let local law enforcement come investigate it.

So the FBI comes to investigate it. Each federal agency has what they call their office of professional responsibility. and there's also the inspector general, but they are not chartered to prosecute anything to present cases in state courts. So what happens, nothing ever happens on these things, even if there's kind of a assessment of wrongdoing when the feds come in to investigate themselves,

they don't have access to a forum to prosecute those things like assault or homicide. So these things always die. It was one of my campaign goals that I told the public that in this county, when the fed shoots somebody, I want to insist that we investigate those crimes. But they outnumber me, Judge, 30 to one. There's 30 federal officers for every one local officer in my county.

So they don't let us in. They don't let us access these crime scenes. They investigate them, but they have no access to the appropriate forum to charge homicide or assault if the federal officer is found to do wrong. But of course, there's the brotherhood of law enforcement where typically when they investigate themselves, they're not going to find wrongdoing. Can you get your hands on the actual evidence in the case? Let's say a federal officer shoots somebody and kills them in your county, and the feds

keep you out from their investigation. Once their investigation is over and they've exonerated this guy, whether it's moral and legal to exonerate him or not, let's just, in our hypothetical, say they've exonerated him. the case is over, can you get your hands on that evidence so that the state can decide whether or not to prosecute? No, never. And also, the FBI is not trained for this type of crime scene analysis to present a homicide investigation to a local prosecutor. Say, for example, if one of my deputies shoots somebody, well, there will be an investigation, not by us, because that's a conflict of

interest, but an outside agency like the state police or a neighboring police department will come in and investigate it, then they will present their findings to the county attorney, the local prosecutor, to see if there's a basis for prosecution. But the ones doing the investigation will be homicide detectives. They will be people that know how to process biological evidence like blood and pathogens. They will know how to do a forensic autopsy through the coroner, looking for toxicology, looking for entry wounds and exit wounds, those type of things. And they will know how to do the correct type of interviews and preserve evidence and videotape the interviews, all homicide detectives are trained to do those things. And then they are unbiased. They present their results to

the local prosecutor who will review that to see if a prosecution is appropriate. That never happens at the federal level. And another thing, I think just a real easy little thought experiment is just kind of do some role reversal on this. Change the players. Can you imagine if there is cell cam footage of an individual, a private individual, sticking their hand into the side window of a car and double-tapping a woman in the head, shooting her twice in the head, she dies and she veers off the road and crashes into other vehicles. There's no prosecutor in the country that wouldn't prosecute that case if it was two private individuals, but we have, you know, we don't have the divine right of kings in this country, but there is a principle called qualified immunity

that sort of presumes that law enforcement is correct in their actions, and they will typically decide to not allow a prosecution to go forward because of this qualified immunity. Another thing that cops are allowed to do in this country, there's case law that says you can rely on information coming from another officer, even if you didn't see a crime, if you didn't witness a crime. So if another officer starts shooting or they yell, gun, gun, well, you're allowed to rely on that and to join in sympathetic fire like a feeding

frenzy. You start shooting because you assume your fellow officer has seen something that's dangerous or a threat to the other law enforcement officer to the public at large. So that concept has been upheld by the Supreme Court that law enforcement officers can join in on something even if they didn't witness a crime. And all kinds of things have been upheld by the courts where if a cop shoot somebody because they saw them holding a cell phone, going for a cell phone, doing what they call furtive movements, it's a split second to make a decision. So the courts won't hold law enforcement to the same standard they do to a private individual that would do the same thing. Let's go back to Minneapolis. I mean, how do you deal with the feds,

when they have overwhelmed your streets, your public parking lots, your public parks, to the point where they're directing traffic, where they're closing streets, to the point where your own police cannot perform the functions that, under the 10th Amendment and under Arizona law, they are obliged to perform. Yeah, that's, Judge, something I deal with every day here, because the feds vastly outnumber local law enforcement. And I always say that the police state is going to enter the U.S. through immigration enforcement because I'm sure you're aware of the 100-mile zone where the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply.

You know, a lot of people, freedom advocates call this the Constitution-free zone. There's a ruling by the Supreme Court that says federal officers have extended border search authority within 100 miles of the U.S. border. So within that zone, they don't need probable cause to pull you over. They need a lower standard. So they pull you over regularly with no probable cause. But the funny thing is, Americans don't realize that 100-mile zone from the international boundary covers two-thirds of the population of the U.S. It covers Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Miami, New Orleans, Houston. So that's in my mind, that's how the police state is going to enter the U.S.

And I've been saying that for years before Trump really pushed the limits on this stuff. And that's why a lot of the cities where initial deployments were done were within that 100 miles zone, like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., you know, Chicago. They are all within 100 miles of the international boundary. But what I have done here is to try to put my foot in the door so where I can investigate these things. And it's an interesting reaction from the feds. In my area, the Border Patrol lawyers, the attorneys for Border Patrol, the office of chief counsel, came to me and asked me to deputize blanket deputization of all ICE agents and all Border Patrol agents in my county to be able to enforce state law.

And I said, well, you know, I can do that. I can deputize anybody to have authority to enforce state law, but why would you want me to do that? They said, well, you know, so we can enforce traffic regulations. And so why do you want to be able to do that? And they said, well, that way we can stop people ostensibly for speeding or something and then be able to look inside the car and start checking documents to see, you know, are you here legally? So at that point, it's like, no, this is a pretext.

I never like the idea of pretextual stops, which is kind of a thing that the feds have always done, get local law enforcement to ostensibly. stop somebody for a traffic violation, but it's really that the feds just want to have a look in the car. So I told them, no, I'm not going to do that. But other sheriffs have done that. Two other sheriffs in the state of Arizona have given the fed's blanket deputization to where they can act as local law enforcement to investigate local crimes. But they haven't been trained on any of that. They haven't been trained on homicide investigations, assault investigations, traffic, citations. They don't know the Arizona statutes that relate to traffic and speech.

and things like that. And another thing the attorneys told me, border patrol attorneys, another reason they wanted me to deputize all the border patrol agents in this county, and I have the two largest border patrol stations in the country here in my little county. Another reason they said is they wanted to be able to charge people for failure to yield, failure to yield. So this is a state charge that says if you don't pull over for law enforcement, they can charge you with an offense under Arizona State law.

And the problem with that is my county has a policy of not doing high speed pursuits if the public's is in danger. Border Patrol does not have that policy. So if I gave them that authority to charge failure to yield, as other sheriffs have done in Arizona, they are continually running people off the road. People are dying in high speed pursuits. And then to cover themselves, Border Patrol will say they have the authority to charge a failure to yield under state law because as a sheriff deputized them. If the feds decide not to reveal the evidence that they have gathered from the killing

of Alex Prettie, will we ever know who fired the shots precisely and how many bullets entered his body? No, never. This has happened in this county, in my county. A Border Patrol agent shot a 16-year-old boy unarmed 10 times with an M-4. which is kind of the modern version of M-16, they were never held to account. The feds investigated that.

Local law enforcement was not allowed to investigate that. And so, of course, they determined there was no reason to go forward criminally. And then a civil lawsuit was filed by the victim's family, and the judge dismissed it because of qualified immunity. That's happened multiple times here. A woman was shot in the head and lived by Border Patrol in my town, And they cordoned off the area and wouldn't allow us to do the investigation or to ever see the evidence. So it's never released to us.

And also they, with the prevalence of cell phones, they try to seize anybody's cell phone that's in the area that may have viewed what has happened so that people don't upload that stuff to YouTube. But in places like Minneapolis, so many people are filming that they can't exactly follow through on that procedure. so a lot of the inside information gets out through cell phone video. But no, on the instances here where Border Patrol's been trigger-happy, including killing each other, we had an incident here where one Border Patrol agent was on one ridge at night using thermal imaging, saw some movement, and just started firing randomly in that direction, killed another Border Patrol agent. Now, for the first month, the Border Patrol was saying, oh, this was a rip crew,

This was some sort of, you know, violent drug trafficking group. And finally, they had to admit that one Border Patrol agent shot another Border Patrol agent. But, you know, these things happen here continually. There was another one. And no prosecution, of course. No, no prosecution. And we never see the evidence any video that they have. Another thing is there are surveillance towers all through this county,

operated by an Israeli company, Elbit, that the Mossad has a back door to all. all that video footage. We are never given any of that footage. Let's say there's a crime within the realm of one of these surveillance platforms, or there's also Reaper drones that fly regularly over the border. There's cameras along the border fence. If there's, let's say, Border Patrol shooting at somebody within the coverage range of one of those cameras, we're never going to see the footage from that so that we can make

decisions on who did what, was there. Who installed? I don't want to get too off the beaten. path here because I want to get back to the killing of Alex Prady, but who installed these Israeli operated surveillance cameras? It must have been a government, either federal or state. Yeah, it was the first Trump administration. They were installed here. They're very large, intrusive towers that have motion detectin systems and infrared thermal imaging systems. They can zoom in at a great distance and get great detail.

They are manned, but they are also automated to where they can sweep in. They monitor a scene, and if movement is detected, it'll zoom in on that and record that. But we've never been given access to that. Also, CBP has multiple aircraft. They have a citation jet in Tucson that patrols the border, helicopters. They have the Reaper drones that are flown remotely out of Riverside, California. Never seen any footage from that. They had a surveillance blimp in this town.

that was there until I protested it multiple times with the media, that this is surveillance state coming into this community. It was anchored two miles from the border, and it had downward-facing video cameras looking into neighborhoods in the U.S. And I made a big stink out of it. I'm a small voice compared to all the federal agencies here, but it was enough me and some protesters about why are we doing surveillance of U.S. citizens in this country. But that was another source of video footage,

And I also ask CBP, hey, you know, with this video footage from this blimp, am I going to have access to this to see if any crimes were committed? And it's always been denied to me. And I am supposedly the chief law enforcement officer for this county. That's what the founding fathers intended. They never intended for all these Johnny come lately three letter agencies that were all created in the 20th century to be enforcing local law enforcement. They have a very minimum charter like the Constitution only meant. like counterfeiting and treason and then you have CBP comes along and they're chartered to investigate immigration but they are not supposed to be a meddling in

anything to do with assault homicide you know anything like that so in the realm of the show so Alex Prety had a lawfully owned and lawfully carried very efficient side army had it in a holster he had the holster in the small of his back and he had a jacket over the holster. Now that is perfectly lawful in Minnesota and it's lawful in Minnesota in all public places, including at political protests. I know this from a conversation with former Governor Tim Pawlenty who signed those laws, that legislation into law in Minnesota. The police came. They saw him not with a gun, but with a cell phone filming them.

Not the police, ICE, excuse me, came. Ice pushed a woman who was filming them to the ground. Alex went to the help of the women. As he moved, they saw the gun in the small of his back. They reached in and removed the gun from this holster, pushed him to the ground, and while on all fours on the ground put either nine or ten rounds into his back. Isn't that murder?

Yeah, I mean, I really love the fact that we have the age of cell phone cameras everywhere. And you can clearly see when Alex Prattie fell to the ground. You can see his hands go forward, bracing himself for the fall, as you would naturally instinctively do. You can see the Border Patrol agent or ICE agent removing the gun on one of those videos, removing the gun, hearing it off to the side, out of the scene. And at that point, like I say, this feeding frenzy mentality, I can only imagine, because you can't hear audio if all the agents were saying that somebody might have yelled gun, you know, and if you do that, a lot of times that, you know, activates the mentality that there's a threat and people pull their guns if they're

not already drawn and maybe start shooting. But I can imagine that maybe for office or safety, agents are trained to do this. I went to Quantico, Quantico, the FBI and DEA Academy. I was trained at local law enforcement academies. They tell you to do that. If there's a gun, if you see a gun, advise your fellow officers, say gun, say that loudly so that they're aware of that. So in that dog pile that was happening, I can only surmise that maybe something like that happened, that one of the agents said, hey, there's a gun, or I got the gun, or I see a gun. And then, you know, with, with, with, with, emotions running high. Probably a lot of the agents had their guns drawn, maybe had their finger on the trigger, and as they were bending down to join the dog pile, it sounds like one of the guns went off. Like somebody had their finger on the trigger,

maybe their hand clenches as they're approaching the ground to join the dog pile. You hear kind of that one boom, and then kind of everybody backs away, and then there's another flurry, and then kind of a final flurry of shots. And like I say, the courts have ruled that fellow officers can rely on information that was seen or related. But this is at least criminally negligent homicide and at worst second degree murder.

Yeah. Well, if there wasn't law enforcement involved, Judge, in that, if that was just a video of the Crips and the Bloods, you know, or like the Rainette Renee Good, if that was Guido doing a hit on some, you know, some fellow, you know, rival mafia gang. if that had materialized without law enforcement there at all, there's no question that the shooters would be charged with that. There's no prosecutor that would say, okay, that was legit what you did. And we've all had the luxury of being able to review that. When I was a kid growing up in the 60s, there wasn't video of all these things. You just kind of would take the law enforcement word on those things. What is ICE?

I mean, are they police? Are they militia? Are they military? Well, they are part of Homeland Security, and actually they prefer to call themselves HSI now, Homeland Security Investigation. When I was the head of DEA in this same part of Southern Arizona, and I had multiple subordinate supervisors underneath us, ICE built a large building right next to ours. And they've gone through iteration of what they were called, like when I first start with the feds, started with the feds in Southern California.

at that point they were called U.S. Customs Office of Enforcement. So these were ununiformed guys that would do kind of follow-up investigations. They would do undercover investigations. Back then you had Border Patrol and then you had immigration, which was a different agency under the Department of Justice. Now, that was all consolidated after 9-11 when they created Homeland Security. And then Border Patrol and the ones wearing blue uniforms that do the ports of entry and the U.S. Customs Office of Enforcement were all merged into the Department of Homeland Security.

And at that point, U.S. Customs Office of Enforcement, the plain global closed guys, their name was changed to ICE, which stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. So these are the ones that are typically not uniformed. They are doing follow-up on cases that are initiated at the ports of entry or by Border Patrol. Border Patrol will seize drugs or have a number. encounter with some undocumented individuals and then they will go back on patrol so they will arrest those people and turn the case over to ice so that's what the traditional ice function is but their their part they are federal law enforcement their job series is what's called a gs 1811 special

agent the same as DEA same as secret service FBI that's what ICE is they are kind of the non-uniformed branch of CBP or of homeland security Sheriff, very interesting conversation. Thank you. None of this is good. None of it's good for personal liberty. None of it's good for federalism, the concept that the states are responsible for safety and not the feds. But it is good that you explain it to us, and you've done so, so clearly, as always. Thank you for joining us, Sheriff. Yeah, thank you so much, Judge. Sure. We look forward to seeing you again. All my best to you. And coming up at 2 o'clock on all of this, all of this, all of you. Also on what exactly are the Russians, Americans, and Ukrainians negotiating in Abu Dhabi? Scott Ritter, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.