Cheers for Sheriff Who Tells Armed Group to ‘Go Home’

The latest on an armed group that took over federal buildings at an Oregon wildlife refuge (all times local): 3:25 p.m. An Oregon sheriff will meet with a small, armed group that has been occupying a national wildlife refuge and ask them to leave peacefully.

Ward asked Bundy to talk it over with his members and said he would call Friday to find out what they had decided.

“I am here to escort you safely out of town”, Harney County Sheriff David Ward told militia leader Ammon Bundy at a rendezvous on a desolate road 20 minutes away from the refuge.

Bundy told reporters Tuesday the group would leave when there was a plan in place to turn over federal lands to locals – a common refrain in a decades-long fight over public lands in the West.

Several residents said they remain angry over the prison sentences imposed on the Hammonds.

“The occupiers have used the flimsiest of pretexts to justify their actions”, said Audubon’s conservation director Bob Sallinger in a statement.

Rodrique, the leader of the Burns Paiute tribe, said the armed occupiers who took over the refuge Saturday are not welcome and have no rights to the property in a Wednesday press conference.

Launched following a bigger demonstration in support of two imprisoned local ranchers, Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son, Steven, the occupation has been marked by daily media briefings from the protesters, and by federal law enforcement agents keeping watch from a distance.

The Audubon Society of Portland, a wildlife conservation group, has also denounced the occupation saying it puts one of the country’s “most important wildlife refuges at risk”. “We don’t want them here”, Jarvis Kennedy of the Burns-Paiute Tribe, which claims that it traditionally owns the land, said at a press conference Wednesday.

Critics of the federal government argue that it often oversteps its authority over land use.

Ammon Bundy and the armed ranchers in OR have one overreaching goal in its ongoing standoff with federal officials.

Rodrique said she told a friend she was offended by the militants’ notion that they could return the refuge lands to their rightful owners. They “hijacked” a peaceful rally held in town last Saturday, he said, and their actions are spreading fear throughout his county.

“We feel like we need to make sure that the Hammonds are out of prison or well on their way”, Bundy said.

“And I’m here today to ask those folks to go home and let us get back to our lives in Harney County”, the sheriff said.

The federal government controls about half of all land in the West, which would make the wholesale transferof ownership extremely hard and expensive.

It is perhaps a sign of how divided – and spooked – the nation is that people can’t decide what to call the armed mob that seized a building in a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon. Since then, additional protesters have joined the group and the militia members have been allowed to come and go as they please. “We do not pose a threat”.

For example, it owns 53 percent of OR, 85 percent of Nevada and 66 percent of Utah, according to the Congressional Research Service. They were convicted of arson three years ago and served no more than a year.