Protesters harassing police, sheriff says

The occupation of a wildlife refuge by armed protesters in OR reflects a decades-old dispute over land rights in the United States, where local communities have increasingly sought to take back federal land.

Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward told community members during a meeting Monday night that the militiamen have also been harassing federal employees around town in attempts to intimidate them.

“We’re planning on going down to the ranch adjacent here to the Malheur Refuge where they’ve cut off the largest portion of their range”, Bundy said in the video address. There are continual reports of law enforcement officers and community members being followed home; of people sitting in cars outside their homes, observing their movements and those of their families; and of people following them and their families as they move around the community.

But the protest supporting the Hammonds led to the armed occupation of the refuge, with occupiers decrying what they call government overreach when it comes to federal lands.

Ward told community members, “there’s an hour glass and it’s running out”, The Oregonian reported (http://goo.gl/CZFaWR ).

Ammon Bundy, the leader of the armed group occupying an OR wildlife refuge, said Monday that he and his fellow occupiers are searching through government documents stored in the facility.

On Saturday, Ammon Bundy’s mother, Carol Bundy, sent an email to supporters asking them to send her son’s group supplies from a list of more than 80 items, including sleeping bags, wool socks, cigarettes, toiletries, food, coffee and “French Vanilla Creamer”.

The occupiers asked the Three Percenters to leave, saying they plan on staying until the federal land is turned over to local control and ranchers Dwight and Steve Hammond are released from their extended prison sentences.

Bundy and his militia brought in a construction vehicle, owned by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), to help pull the fence down.

The armed protesters haven’t just claimed the refuge – they’re changing it.

Judith Kohler of the National Wildlife Federation points out wide-spread support for maintaining public lands and not giving them away to anyone, least of all militants wearing cowboy hats and waving guns.

A man representing hunters and anglers, who arrived in OR from New Mexico this weekend, condemned the Bundy group at the earlier news conference.

Garrett VeneKlasen, who heads the New Mexico outdoors group, called the people holding the refuge “extremists”, who are breaking the law and need to leave. “They are domestic terrorists”. “I think people are getting excited about it because this is like the first time that this has happened”.