Supporters of Nevada cattleman and states’ rights advocate Cliven Bundy and his sons have built a mock jail cell outside a rural Nevada federal prison where 17 defendants are being held pending trial in a 2014 standoff with government agents near the Bundy ranch outside Las Vegas.
Two months of testimony in the first Bunkerville standoff trial concluded Monday with a defendant’s dramatic assertion that authorities sat in foxholes waiting to shoot protesters who arrived at the site where federal agents for days had been rounding up Cliven Bundy’s cattle.
The standoff in Oregon has attracted more than cowboy-hatted ranchers preaching the Constitution and denouncing the Bureau of Land Management.
A new report from a national organization dedicated to fighting hate groups and racism takes the government to task for mishandling the April 12 armed showdown with Bunkerville rancher Cliven Bundy, but its authors were equally critical of Bundy and his militia supporters.
Ranching on federal public lands is diminishing, and remaining ranchers in Nevada and throughout the West — a hardy breed of survivors enduring changing times — are feeling squeezed by the federal government.
Dozens of people rode their ATVs and motorcycles on an off-limits trail in southern Utah on Saturday in a protest against what the group calls the federal government’s overreaching control of public lands.
The Bureau of Land Management quietly dismantled its so-called “First Amendment areas” in northeastern Clark County on Thursday, as the fight over Cliven Bundy’s cattle widened into a national debate about states’ rights and federal land-use policy.
