Free Republic

Every month, Raymond Yowell, the 84-year-old former chief of the Shoshone Indian Tribe in northeastern Nevada, has almost $200 garnished from his $1,150 Social Security check, and it all dates back to a 5:00am phone call on a Friday morning in 2002. That morning, a government official from the Bureau of Land Management told him to come down to a seizure site where the 132 cattle he owned were about to be impounded.When he arrived, men brandishing handguns told him he couldn't get any closer than 250 yards from his cattle. He watched from a distance as the government loaded...

Tonight, Judge Jeanine assaults Harry Reid and the BLM, giving no quarter. Video at link.

Environmental mitigation necessary for a planned solar power project may have motivated the federal Bureau of Land Management’s decision to launch a military-style armed enforcement action against a Nevada cattle rancher, government documents reveal. According to the documents, BLM determined continued cattle grazing would interfere with the Bureau’s plans to use the land as an environmental mitigation area for desert tortoise disruption caused by the solar facility. In 1993, the BLM designated hundreds of thousands of acres of federal lands in Nevada for conservation to protect desert tortoises. The BLM told rancher Cliven Bundy—whose family had raised cattle on the...

70 year old Shoshone Tribal Elder describes Harry Reid and the BLM's 30 year-long GRAB for her family's ancestral lands. In the early nineties, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the US Government set it sights on another tract of land in Nevada… The target this time was the ANCESTRAL tribal land of two elderly, Native American sisters from the Dann band of Western Shoshones, Mary and Carrie Dann. In a case that sounds familiar to the Bundy family’s plight, the BLM charged that the Dann sisters' livestock was trespassing on federal land. The BLM first planned to round...

When Kit Laney answered a knock on his door Saturday, law enforcement officers from the U.S. Forest Service handed him a piece of paper announcing his Diamond Bar Ranch in southwest New Mexico would be shut down Wednesday and his 300 head of cattle grazing there would be removed – one way or the other. Other Forest Service officials were busy nailing similar notices on fence posts along the highway and informing neighbors that after Feb. 11, they should not attempt to enter the Diamond Bar property. Laney was not surprised. He knew someday there would be an on-the-ground confrontation...