Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward said Friday that he’s shelving the meeting after Ammon Bundy rejected Ward’s plea for the small group of anti-government activists to leave the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
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“I understand that the occupiers of the federal land have said that they will leave if the local community doesn’t want them, and from what I’m seeing in the news, the local community doesn’t want them”, Clinton said in an interview with the Las Vegas Sun.
A member of the group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters Duane Ehmer rides his horse Hellboy at the occupied Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on the sixth day of the occupation of the federal building in Burns, Oregon on January 7, 2016. But not yet.Bundys group calling itself Citizens for Constitutional Freedom comes from as far away as Arizona and Michigan.Bundys protest at the refuge is a continuation of long-running arguments that federal policies for management of public lands in the West are harming ranchers and other locals.
Bundy came to Burns to rally support for two local ranchers who were sentenced to prison on arson charges.
Several residents said they remain angry over the prison sentences imposed on the Hammonds.
Bundy said on Tuesday that once the group’s mission was accomplished, they would leave.
The Harney County Sheriff is holding a meeting at the county fairgrounds at 4:00 today.
Early Wednesday, he compared the occupiers to the symbol of the civil rights movement, tweeting, “We are doing the same thing as Rosa Parks did”.
The protesters who took over a federal building in southeast OR did not accept the local sheriff’s offer for safe passage out of the state.
“We don’t feel it’s quite time yet”, protest leader Ammon Bundy told a news conference at the refuge on Wednesday.
Bundy is the son of a Nevada rancher who, along with a large group of armed men, stared down federal agents in 2014 when they tried to seize his cattle over unpaid grazing fees.
Ammon Bundy offered few specifics about the group’s plan to get the land turned over to local control, but Finicum said they would examine the underlying land ownership transactions to begin to “unwind it”.
Walden said he’d rather the armed occupiers realize that they’ve made their case and go home. “That’s what I wanted to post on Facebook, ‘Quit b– on your electronic devices and come down here and see these people because they are not how they are portrayed in the media'”.
Bundy replied by asking the sheriff to address the land-use issue at the heart of the controversy with the federal government that led to the occupation – to which Ward replied that it was not his jursidiction. “Let’s get our community back to normal”. He said a “collective effort from multiple agencies is now working on a solution”.
The meetings were friendly, he said, and he told them that they were there to make neither side escalates the dispute. Last night, Sheriff Ward urged locals to distance themselves from the militants.
The protesters have claimed the community is behind them.
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The armed militia’s standoff with the US government over ranchers’ land rights has bewildered the leaders of the tribe.
