The flashpoint for Saturday’s takeover of the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge outside the town of Burns, Oregon, was the imminent incarceration of two ranchers convicted of arson and re-sentenced to longer prison terms.
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A band of anti-government militiamen occupying a federal wildlife reserve in rural OR dug in for a fourth day on Tuesday (Jan 25), despite the ranchers they claimed to be defending denouncing their actions and turning themselves in to the law.
Bob Sallinger, conservation director of the Audubon Society of Portland, said in a statement this week that occupation of the refuge “holds hostage public lands and public resources to serve the very narrow political agenda of the occupiers”. Mr. Bundy, whose rancher father Cliven Bundy conducted a similar protest in 2014 that attracted Republican supporters until the elder Bundy’s racist rants sent them scurrying, doesn’t have the best anti-federal government bona fides.
Four days into their occupation, the anti-government activists who took over a federal wildlife refuge in OR hinted on Tuesday that their days there might be numbered. Federal prosecutors said the fires were set to cover up poaching.
David Ward, sheriff of Harney County, where the occupation is taking place, has joined calls for the standoff to end and for the gunmen to leave.
Bundy, 40, has told news organizations that the issue is over land rights and the group of men who have taken over the site are calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom.
Bundy said the group started once they understood the Hammonds were put under duress from the federal government.
The men served their original sentences – three months for Dwight and one year for Steven. The Bundy brothers made it clear that they would not rule out violence if law enforcement officers attempted to remove them from the building.
The refuge established in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt to protect birds from hunters selling plumes to the hat industry has expanded to 300 square miles over the years.
LaVoy Finicum, an Arizona rancher, told reporters at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Tuesday evening that he is one of the people who is a subject of the warrants, but he offered no details.
The valley rimmed by distant mountains contains lakes and marshland and now surrounds the ranch Dwight Hammond bought with his father in 1964.
The occupation marked the latest outbreak of anger against the U.S. government over federally owned land in Western states, long seen by political conservatives in the region as an intrusion on property rights and individual freedom.
“The last 10 or 15 years, the refuge and the ranchers who use the refuge have been getting along famously”, he said.
Federal authorities have told CNN that they are monitoring the situation, while local authorities now appear to be blocking access to the facility, according to the Guardian.
“It is frustrating when I hear the demand that we return the land to the people, because it is in the people’s hand – the people own it”, Eardley said.
Some militia leaders said Bundy was using the dispute to provoke the federal government with little regard for the local community.
Keith Landon, a longtime resident of Burns who works at the Reid Country Store, said he sympathizes with the Bundys’ frustrations. Finicum said. “The feds were pointing guns at me”.
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The SPLC typically considers militia groups to be ones that follow extreme anti-government doctrines and promote “groundless conspiracy theories” about the federal government.
