“Due to safety considerations for both those inside the refuge as well as the law enforcement officers involved, we will not be releasing any specifics with regards to the law enforcement response”.
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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.
So far, there has been no visible police presence at the reserve, where several armed men in vehicles guarded the entrance while others kept watch from a lookout tower. “We would love to see the hundreds of ranchers who’ve lost their land return to their land”.
The movement has also been energized by confrontations between ranchers, miners and federal regulators in the Western United States, where the government owns vast stretches of land.
Local authorities have not yet attempted to reclaim the refuge. Locals who rely upon federal lands to graze cattle and sheep say they worry every time an environmental concern arises or a particularly bad wildfire season hits. The government said the rancher owed more than $1 million for using federal land for cattle grazing.
Opponents said the federal government should administer lands for the widest possible uses, including environmental and recreational.
The Hammonds turned themselves in Monday afternoon to federal authorities in Los Angeles.
Ammon Bundy came to OR hoping to rally support behind his cause, but his tactics have been broadly rejected by many locals, by the state’s main ranching group and by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which the Bundy family has belonged to for generations.
Randy Eardley, a Bureau of Land Management spokesman, said the group’s call for land ownership transfer didn’t make sense.
The Two-Way has gone into depth about the history of tension between the federal government and ranchers in the West.
-His brother Ammon Bundy told a news conference that the group was forced into their actions.
“They say just to kind of show the fact that they’re around”.
The occupiers say they intend to divvy the 187,000-acre migratory bird sanctuary among dozens of landholders they say hold rightful claim to the land.
The occupation would end when “the Hammonds are freed and the federal government gives up control of the Malheur National Forest”, Bundy tweeted. The fire got out of control, the Hammonds have said. Originally, a federal district judge had given Dwight Hammond three months in prison and Steven Hammond one year and one day, saying the mandatory minimum of five years was “grossly disproportionate” and would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
“I agree with a lot of this”, he says.
“Every one of us has a constitutional right to protest, to speak our minds”. But it is rejected by mainstream Mormons today, according to Matthew Bowman, a professor of American religion at Henderson State University in Arkansas.
The takeover puts federal officials in a delicate position of deciding whether to confront the occupiers, risking bloodshed, or stand back and possibly embolden others to directly confront the government. Officials later revoked Bundy’s grazing rights completely.
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Now in Oregon, a group of armed ranchers have taken over a National Wildlife Refuge building in Burns, Oregon in protest.
