While Cruz has not publicly endorsed the Oregon militia standoff, his pledge to ‘return full control of Nevada’s lands to its rightful owners’ strikes a similar chord

Ted Cruz’s campaign backers are aligning the Republican presidential candidate with political cause of Nevada’s infamous and recently-jailed rancher Cliven Bundy, harnessing the same anti-government fervor that fueled an armed standoff in neighboring Oregon.

Ahead of Tuesday’s Republican caucuses in Nevada, Cruz has released a new ad promising to fight back against federal control of public lands – a move that addresses the central grievance of Cliven and his sons, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, who led the armed takeover of a national wildlife refuge in Oregon last month.



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Although the Texas senator hasn’t publicly supported the Bundy militia, Cruz has emerged as the candidate most closely tied to their ultra-conservative protests against federal land-use restrictions.

Some of the Cruz campaign’s Nevada representatives are painting the candidate as a champion of anti-government activism in the west – even as the Bundy brothers leading that movement face accusations in court of violently conspiring against federal officials and threatening and assaulting law enforcement agents.

The most direct link between Cruz and the Bundys is Nevada assemblywoman Michele Fiore, who is a member of Cruz’s leadership team in the key swing state and the most outspoken elected official defending the armed militia in Oregon.

“Ted Cruz is the only candidate talking about giving lands back to the state where they belong,” said Fiore, who earned national attention this month when she traveled to the Oregon standoff and helped negotiate a resolution. “This is a very, very, very important issue to him.”

Nevada’s “first in the west” Republican caucuses come two weeks after the occupation in Oregon unraveled and federal authorities arrested Cliven Bundy, father of Ammon and Ryan.

Their father, Cliven, is the Nevada rancher whose 2014 standoff with the government over his refusal to pay grazing fees energized rightwing land-use protesters across the region. His ranch is in the town of Bunkerville, Nevada.

Fiore has been one of his biggest defenders.

Sitting in a jail cell in Portland hundreds of miles away from the frenzy of campaigns that landed in Nevada this week, Ammon Bundy said he is hoping the presidential candidates respond to his message.

“I have heard several candidates talk about the constitution and its importance,” the 40-year-old said in a recent phone call from jail that his lawyer recorded for the Guardian. “I would like to hear them be very simple in understanding that the land belongs to the people … and that the constitution does not allow the federal government to own or control land inside the state.”

Ammon Bundy has so far decided against endorsing any candidate, but he said he wanted a president who will acknowledge that “the federal government’s overreach has caused destruction in this nation”.

Cruz, who beat Republican frontrunner Donald Trump in Iowa, which held the first-in-the-nation caucus, has since only managed to register third-place finishes in New Hampshire and South Carolina. His supporters hope that his anti-government stances make him well-positioned in Nevada, a state with strong libertarian tendencies.

The Cruz ad, which splices images of the senator with photographs of ranchers in the desert, appears to chime with the Bundy family’s belief that the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) restrictions have hurt ranchers and local economies

“Eighty-five percent of Nevada is owned and regulated by the federal government,” Cruz says. “You, the people of Nevada, not Washington bureaucrats, should be in charge of your own land. If you trust me with your vote, I will fight day and night to return full control of Nevada’s lands to its rightful owners.”

Fiore – who described the Bundys and other arrested Oregon occupiers as nonviolent “cowboys” and “political prisoners” – argued that Cruz is the only true conservative candidate who will take the kind of aggressive action on land-use policy that Ammon Bundy is seeking. “The BLM has been nothing more than a bureaucracy of terrorism,” she added.

In Carson City, Nevada’s capital, it’s not hard to find legislators who are active Cruz campaigners and have also, to varying degrees, endorsed the actions of the Bundys.

“I know Cliven, Ammon and Ryan. To me, this is a purely political prosecution,” said Nevada assemblyman John Moore, a Republican who is also on Cruz’s Nevada leadership team. “The federal government … has an agenda, and they’re using the Bundys as another way to get more land.”

Moore said he hasn’t spoken to Cruz about the Bundys, but added: “I would venture to say Cruz is sympathetic to the underlying causes.”

Assemblyman Ira Hansen, another Cruz supporter in Nevada, said the lands issue could help him win the state by capitalizing on the same anger that catalyzed the Bundy ranch fight in 2014 and the recent Oregon occupation.

“Here in Nevada, it’s the anti-establishment on steroids,” said Hansen. “[Cruz] is very supportive of the idea that the federal government needs to back out … and he is going to do extremely well in rural Nevada.”

While his surrogates have described the Bundys as heroes and victims of government oppression, Cruz has only once addressed the Oregon militia with a short comment siding with law enforcement. He told reporters: “We don’t have a constitutional right to use force of violence.”

Cruz spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment on the candidate’s stance on the Bundys, but made Nevada assemblyman Jim Wheeler available to speak on behalf of the campaign.

“Ted Cruz is a law and order guy,” Wheeler said when asked whether the candidate supports the Bundys’ protests. “You follow the law. If you don’t like the law, you have the power to change it.” Wheeler acknowledged, however, that the Bundy protests had pushed the issue forward. “The one thing Oregon and Bunkerville did is bring it to the front and get the conversation started.”

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Cruz, in his new ad, also used his stance on land-use rights to attack Trump, who recently said: “I don’t like the idea [of local control of federal land] because I want to keep the lands great, and you don’t know what the state is going to do.”

Nevada senator Pete Goicoechea, a Republican who has not endorsed a candidate in the presidential race, said the real estate mogul’s stance could hurt him. “The statements that Donald Trump made … that he’d never agree to any public land transfer, good luck caucusing in Nevada.”

Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment, and a Rubio spokesman referred to an earlier statement from the Florida senator in which he condemned the occupation, but agreed that there is too much federal control of land.

The issue of land control appears to be seeping into national policy discussions and the presidential race in an unprecedented way, said Matt Lee-Ashley, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning thinktank that has documented the candidates’ positions on the subject.

“This is the first time that we potentially have this debate over whether public lands should be maintained in the current management by Americans, owned by taxpayers, or fundamentally transferred to states or auctioned off,” he said.

Cliven’s wife, Carol Bundy, said she and her husband have not yet decided which candidate to support. After hearing Cruz’s recent statement, she said: “I wasn’t convinced too much. What he said is good … but I want a little more. I want to know how he is going to do it.”

She said she was not confident any candidate would make a serious effort to get the federal government out of Nevada. “Nobody wants to take a stand on this, and I think that’s sad,” she said.