Conservative Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz has urged the armed activists who have occupied a federal wildlife refuge building in Oregon to "stand down peaceably,"
NBC News reports.
The exact wording of Cruz's statement directly refutes rancher Ammon Bundy's earlier call for militia members to help him occupy the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
Bundy, son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy,
posted a video on his Facebook page saying "this is not a time to stand down. It's a time to stand up and come to Harney County."
The building at the refuge was occupied on Saturday.
"Every one of us has a constitutional right to protest, to speak our minds," Cruz said in Iowa, NBC reports. "But we don't have a constitutional right to use force and violence and to threaten force and violence against others. So it is our hope that the protesters there will stand down peaceably, that there will not be a violent confrontation."
The armed protesters occupied the refuge in anger over the five-year prison sentences handed out to Dwight Hammond Jr. and Steven Hammond, a father and son convicted of committing arson on federal property,
The Hill reports.
The Hammonds were originally sentenced to a lighter term but federal prosecutors appealed and got the five-year sentences by referring to guidelines aimed at "punishing terrorists," The Hill reports.
The Hammonds reported to prison to serve their sentences Monday,
ABC News reports.
Cruz, a favorite of anti-Washington conservatives, further separated himself from the armed protesters by saying "our prayers" are with the law enforcement forces confronting them, NBC reports.