Sam Levin in Burns, Oregon, and Nicky Woolf in San Francisco
The standoff with armed militia in Oregon escalated on Friday after police swooped in on one of the protesters to make the first arrest in connection with the two-week occupation of a federal wildlife refuge.
Kenneth Medenbach, who was arrested for unauthorized use of a government vehicle, is a chainsaw sculptor and longtime nemesis of the government with a history of previous entanglements with the courts over the occupation of federal lands.
He is the first militiaman connected to the armed occupation to be arrested since the bird sanctuary in rural Oregon was unexpectedly taken over on 2 January.
Medenbach, 62, was detained outside a Safeway supermarket in Burns, Oregon, some 30 miles from the Malheur national wildlife refuge, according to a statement from the Harney County sheriff’s office.
He appears to have driven from the occupied compound to a local supermarket in a vehicle allegedly stolen from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which runs the refuge. The sheriff’s office statement said that law enforcement officers recovered “two vehicles stolen from the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge”.
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This is not Medenbach’s first tangle with the law. He is currently out on bail, according to court documents, awaiting trial for a seven-month residential occupation of government land between May and November 2015.
Medenbach was tried and convicted of the same crime in 1996. According to a forest service officer who testified at that trial, Medenbach was living in “an eight-by-ten-foot tent with a metal flue and wood-burning stove, a nearby campfire, and various cooking and sleeping equipment”.
According to a court memorandum, the magistrate said that Medenbach posed a risk to public safety and said that he had referenced Ruby Ridge and Waco, two sieges that ended in violence. At a detention hearing, the government said that Medenbach had tried to protect his campsite with “50 to 100 pounds of the explosive ammonium sulfate, a pellet gun, and what appeared to be a hand grenade with trip wires.”
Convicted and given a six-month suspended sentence, Medenbach appealed the case to the federal ninth circuit court, where he argued that federal ownership of unappropriated public lands was unconstitutional. He also filed a civil suit to demand that federal judges no longer swear an oath of affirmation under the constitution, a position he defended in this blog post from January 2015.
According to one local report, the two vehicles, one a pickup truck and one a passenger van, bore door signs reading “Harney County Resource Center” – the new name occupiers have given to the sanctuary. The man police suspected of driving the second government vehicle into town already had gone into the grocery store before police arrived, the report said.
The arrest, which marks the first confrontation between law enforcement and the armed occupiers, came hours before Ammon Bundy, the leader of the militia, and the other armed men had planned to hold a meeting with the local community at which the occupiers said they planned to discuss ending the protest.