Authorities plan to bring charges against Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein after she joined protesters of the Dakota Access Pipeline in spray painting graffiti on equipment at a construction site Tuesday.
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The Green Party candidate for president has been charged with criminal trespass after being accused of vandalism at an oil pipeline protest in North Dakota.
“This needs to come to an end”, Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier said at a Tuesday news conference following the protest, urging tribal leaders to address their grievances in the courts.
Stein, who was not arrested at Tuesday’s protest, admitted in a statement to spray-painting the bulldozer during the anti-oil demonstration, which concerned construction that she said amounted to desecrating Native American burial sites.
The sheriff’s department claims, in a press release, that Baraka painted the word “decolonization” on one of the bulldozers.
The Standing Rock Sioux tribe has been protesting the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline, which would carry crude oil from North Dakota to IL. Angry protesters faced off with construction workers at the site on Saturday.
Her campaign office admits to the act, and Stein remains unapologetic.
According to BBC News, there have been over 3,000 pipeline protesters there since April and security forces have used dogs to move protesters out of the area.
Stein was arrested for trespassing in Texas during her 2012 presidential campaign when she tried to take supplies to protesters opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline. On 6 September 2016, a federal judge sided with the Sioux, at least preliminarily, and granted their emergency request to halt construction on a segment of the pipeline in North Dakota.
Jill Stein, Green Party presidential nominee and long-time fighter for the environment, showed up in North Dakota just a few short days after the protests turned violent.
The tribe says the pipeline threatens sacred sites and drinking water. He also said that there were two more attacks on crews Tuesday. The DAPL is a $3.8 billion project, meant to transport crude oil from Montana and North Dakota’s Bakken Formation to oil refineries in the Gulf Coast.
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Both of the charges filed against Stein in North Dakota were misdemeanors. First the Commission on Presidential Debates refused to let her participate in the presidential debates; now a warrant has been issued for her arrest. We are greatly saddened and extremely bothered to confirm that today, unwarranted violence occurred on private property under easement to Dakota Access Pipeline, resulting in injury to multiple members of our security personnel and several dogs.
