Leader of armed group says no plans to leave

At a community meeting attended by hundreds of people in Burns on Wednesday evening, cheers erupted when Harney County Sheriff David Ward said it was time for the group at the refuge to “pick up and go home”.

At that meeting, local residents said they sympathized with the armed group’s complaints about federal land management but disagreed with their tactics and called on Ammon Bundy and his followers to leave. Participants came from as far away as Arizona and MI.

The small, armed group occupying a remote national wildlife preserve in OR has said repeatedly that local people should control federal lands – a sentiment that frustrates critics who say the lands are already…

Bundy, whose family is known for leading anti-federal government standoffs in the past, said that the group – which media reports numbers about 20 – is also defending local ranchers Dwight Hammond Jr. and Steven Hammond from imprisonment for arson.

Three members of a different militia group, Veterans on Patrol, arrived at the compound on Wednesday. And ranchers seeking federal grazing permits and leases see the government as blocking their efforts to make a living.

The Pacific Patriots Network has previously said that while it agrees with Bundy’s grievances on land rights, it does not support the occupation, a position leader Brandon Rapolla reiterated during the meeting.

Harney County Sheriff David Ward met Thursday with Bundy. Their father, Cliven Bundy, along with a band of armed men, stared down federal agents trying to seize his livestock in Nevada in 2014. “We recognize that. We don’t feel it’s quite time yet”, he said.

The Hammonds have said they don’t support the actions of this latest armed group. “We always consider what people say”, Bundy said.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has described the Bundys’ views as closely aligned with those of the sovereign citizen movement, which generally believes that the United States government is illegitimate.

According to his Twitter profile, Bundy joined the site this month and under his profile description, wrote: “Leave our land alone”. A judge later ruled the terms fell short of minimum sentences that require them to serve about four more years.

“The federal government has done a gross injustice to the Hammonds, which has severely damaged the long-term trust and cooperation that ranchers and foresters and recreationists have had with BLM”, said President Barry Bushue.

“If these OR terrorists were black, they’d be dead”, Rian Brown, one of the leaders of the Cleveland Black Lives Matter movement told INSIDER.

Other tribe members, in an even harsher denunciation of the group that has occupied the refuge since Saturday, said the protesters were a public menace and an insult to the local people.

The FBI is working with local and state police on the case, and the agency said it’s attempting to “bring a peaceful resolution to the situation”. “If they don’t want to retrieve their rights, and if the county people tell us to leave, we’ll leave”.