< Utah Sheriffs Threaten To Arrest Rangers If They Try To Close Public Lands

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

We now spend time with a man who is challenging federal authority. He is a county sheriff in Utah. And he talks of a arresting federal rangers.

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

He's part of a group of sheriffs who say they want to preserve ranchers' access to federal land. Their threats are directed at rangers who try to close forest roads.

INSKEEP: It's all happening after the arrest of Cliven Bundy and many of his militia supporters. NPR's Kirk Siegler takes us inside the sheriff's car.

KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: Sometimes it's hard to tell whether Garfield County Sheriff James Danny Perkins is serious or pulling your leg.

JAMES PERKINS: Now, you are in a police vehicle. You understand that, right?

SIEGLER: He's gesturing toward the center console inside his pickup.

PERKINS: There is a gun in here if you happen to ever need a gun. I don't think you will, but...

SIEGLER: I'd say he's half joking this time. I mean, Garfield County is roughly the size of Connecticut, and it's up to Perkins and a half-dozen deputies to patrol all of it.

PERKINS: The country's big and it's vast. I mean, it's - it's like this for miles and miles and miles.

SIEGLER: Ninety-four percent of this county is federal land, so you'd think, then, that Perkins would welcome the help of federal authorities. Think again. In the sagebrush hills outside the one-stop-light town of Panguitch, Utah, he pulls off the highway and points to a dirt track.

PERKINS: This is a conflict. You're going to see just a little bit of. Here's a road right here that was put here with teams and wagons.

SIEGLER: We're talking pioneer wagons here. Boulders lie in front of it and a bulldozer chewed it up, so pickups or ATVs can't drive up it anymore. Federal rangers did this recently, he says. Locals have had access here for generations.

PERKINS: There is an agenda, and don't kid yourself. There's an agenda to get rid of the grazing. There's an agenda to shut down a lot of our roads.

SIEGLER: Tensions over federal land - who gets to do what on it and who's in charge of it - are as high as they've been out here since at least the 1990s. Perkins and many others in his position will give you an earful about how they believe federal agencies have been taken over by environmental extremists. But this is more than just a turf battle. Perkins, too, has an agenda. He proudly refers to himself as a constitutional sheriff.

PERKINS: Because I raise my arm to the square and I swore to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

SIEGLER: A few miles away in his office, he swivels back in his chair and starts digging through a file cabinet.

PERKINS: Let me grab one more thing for you. Do you remember what the Federalist Papers are?

SIEGLER: I didn't know I'd get a civics lesson.

PERKINS: (Laughter).

SIEGLER: He keeps copies of the papers and the Constitution on hand. Nowhere in them, he says, does it say anything about BLM or Forest Service law enforcement officers, let alone whether they have authority to pull people over for driving off-road or arrest people for illegal campfires. He says, as sheriff, he answers to the state of Utah.

PERKINS: The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. I can even understand that.

SIEGLER: There are few dozen or so Sheriffs, mostly in rural Western states, who refer to themselves as constitutionalists. It's not really a movement, but they are outspoken, and rarely do they hesitate to get in very public fights with the Obama administration over everything from gun control to whether the BLM should have law-enforcement powers. It's clear Sheriff Perkins, who's also a rancher, wants to push some boundaries. He talks openly about detaining - or, as he says, Mirandizing - federal rangers. He recalls one case recently.

PERKINS: I told the Forest Service ranger that if he went out and closed a road that Garfield County has jurisdiction on, I would arrest him.

SIEGLER: And then there was the time that his deputies did arrest a BLM ranger they said was illegal issuing citations to campers.

PERKINS: It wasn't me that pulled the trigger on that deal. Do I think he needed to come to jail? I do. The guy's a fruitcake.

SIEGLER: For federal land managers, this was the latest instance of threats and intimidation directed at their field staff in the West. There's been an increase in reported confrontations lately. But when I talked to the BLM's second-in-charge in Washington, D.C., Steve Ellis, he seemed to downplay the tensions, saying they're actually not that common.

STEVE ELLIS: The key thing is working cooperatively with local law enforcement, with these sheriffs. That's our desire.

SIEGLER: Ellis also told me the BLM's mission is inherently controversial.

ELLIS: This is the national system of public land, so we - we manage these lands for all Americans.

SIEGLER: Still, the BLM is worried, especially after the armed standoffs in Nevada and Oregon. And there are sheriffs in the West who sympathize with the now-jailed Cliven Bundy and his militia followers. A lot of the principles these constitutional sheriffs espouse are some of the same things you hear from the Bundys.

PERKINS: Come on in, Kirk.

SIEGLER: Sheriff Danny Perkins told me he was invited and, in some instances, pressured by local ranchers to join the Bundys, but he would have none of it.

PERKINS: I said it at the time, and I'll stand by it, that it's nothing but domestic terrorism. Yes, there's been a story. They've been - a lot of these guys have been bullied around by the BLM, but you don't handle it that way.

SIEGLER: So despite all of his tough talk, Perkins is being careful and still working within the system. He and other sheriffs have been going to D.C. a lot lately and lobbying. In the past few weeks, he says, after Utah Republicans introduced a bill to strip law enforcement powers from the BLM, relations out here are getting better. Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Panguitch, Utah.

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