Republican lawmaker expresses sympathy with armed protesters in Oregon

A leading lawmaker in the US House of Representatives has defended the armed protesters occupying a federal wildlife refuge in the state of Oregon as a display of “peaceful” civil disobedience. 

Representative Raúl Labrador, a Republican from Idaho, accused the media on Wednesday of being less sympathetic to the protests started by armed, anti-government conservatives who seek to free federally owned land.

“They’re trying to express their frustration. And I think civil disobedience has been something that for the most part the liberal media used to stand up for. But apparently there’s some exceptions to that,” Labrador said at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, DC.

The congressman (pictured below) expressed sympathy for the protesters, who are angry about what they view as the US government’s intrusion on public lands.

“You have all that frustration happening with the takeover of the lands by the federal government, with the unjust sentence, and you have just the frustration that they feel the federal government is not listening to them anymore,” Labrador said. 

“And that’s what leads to what so far has been a peaceful takeover of an abandoned building, by the way,” he added.

The armed anti-government protesters, who took over the federal building on Saturday, have vowed to continue their occupation even as local officials told the group to leave.

The occupation marked the latest outbreak of anger against the US government over federally owned land in Western states, long seen by political conservatives in the region as an intrusion on property rights and individual freedom.

Saturday's takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge outside the town of Burns, Oregon, was spurred by the imprisonment of two ranchers for setting fires that spread to federal land.

The group, which calls itself the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, has vowed to remain in the building until federally owned land is returned "back to the people."

Protest leader Ammon Bundy is the son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, whose ranch was the scene of an armed demonstration against federal Bureau of Land Management officials in 2014.

"They (the federal government) are coming down into the states and taking over the land and the resources, putting the people into duress, putting the people into poverty," Ammon Bundy said.

The FBI, which is monitoring the situation, has not specified how long it will wait before it begins to force the protesters out. The agency said in a statement it was seeking a "peaceful resolution."

Obama administration officials said US law enforcement officers had been told to avoid a violent confrontation with the occupiers.

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 US government is illegitimate.

The sovereign citizen movement is considered by the FBI as the nation’s top domestic terrorism threat.

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