A pickup blocked the entrance Tuesday morning to a national wildlife refuge in OR where a small, armed group has been occupying the remote area since Saturday.
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“The BLM wants that land bad and they’ll probably end up getting it”, said Tim Slate, a butcher who said he had gone out to slaughter the Hammonds’ cattle many times over the years, using an acronym for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
In a county with a population of fewer than 8,000, most people know or are related to someone who works for the federal government, Ward said.
Ammon and Ryan Bundy are the sons of rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights in Nevada.
“These are public lands”, LaVoy Finicum, a rancher from Arizona, said.
In the Book of Alma, Moroni said: “I do not fear your power nor your authority, but it is my God whom I fear, and it is according to his commandments that I do take my sword to defend the cause of my country”.
Some ranchers have strongly objected to the government’s management of federal land, especially over issues of water or environmental conservation, and to the terms of their leases. “It took an unfortunate turn when some of those people broke off and began an armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge”.
A members of the group occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters, walks to one of it’s buldings Monday, Jan. 4, 2016, near Burns, Ore.
Authorities have closed schools for the week in the area out of concerns of possible violence, although so far the occupation has been peaceful.
“The problem that we are seeing … is how do you manage people who treat the land as though it was their own, even though it was never their own”, said Gerald Torres, a law professor at Cornell University.
Federal land ownership in the United States is largely concentrated in the West, where the government overall controls just over half of territory in 13 states, according to government records. The militants contend the federal government does not have the constitutional authority to own the property, or nearby grazing lands.
Protest leader Ammon Bundy said Tuesday that their plan was to help local residents regain their rights from the federal government and then they would go home.
The US National Wildlife Refuge System is the system of public lands and waters set aside to conserve America’s fish, wildlife and plants.
Ward has called a community meeting Wednesday afternoon.
The younger Bundy’s anti-government group is critical of federal land stewardship.
“Neither Ammon Bundy nor anyone within his group/organization speak for the Hammond family”, the Hammonds’ attorney, W. Alan Schroeder, wrote to Harney County Sheriff David Ward. “They won”, said Heidi Beirich, director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups.
The Oregonian reports that an estimated 300 militiamen from several states took part in a rally to protest the arrest of two ranchers, 73-year-old Dwight Hammond and his son Steven Hammond, who must report to a California prison based on a federal judge’s ruling in an arson case. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that their original sentence was too short because it violated a five-year mandatory minimum for arson on federal land.
The takeover comes amid a dispute that dates back decades in the West. In the 1970s, Nevada and other states pushed for local control in what was known as the Sagebrush Rebellion.
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That standoff drew hundreds of armed protesters after federal agents sought to seize Bundy’s cattle because he refused to pay grazing fees.
