'Sickening': Ammon Bundy slams ICE as major schism tears apart right-wing militants

Ammon Bundy was the most famous right-wing militant in America not long ago, after he led two armed standoffs against federal agents at his family's Nevada ranch and an Oregon bird sanctuary, but his outspoken criticism of President Donald Trump has made him an outcast in his own community.

The 50-year-old published a lengthy essay in November on "God's law and the unalienable right to migrate" and decried the Trump administration’s treatment of undocumented immigrants as a "moral failure." In a recent livestream he condemned the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minnesota, and he spoke with The Atlantic a few hours after federal immigration agents gunned down Alex Pretti.

“It’s sickening to me, just to see the parallels of history repeating itself,” Bundy told the magazine's Jacob Stern. “When it comes to the more humanitarian side of it, I think the left has it much more correct than the nationalist right.”

Bundy remains deeply conservative, saying that Democrats are “communist-anarchists” who are “spurred by wickedness,” but his ideological allies have shifted toward what he sees as a “nationalist” movement with authoritarian tendencies, as Stern found when he interviewed some of those former anti-government militants.

"After Good was shot and killed, I reached out to a number of those who stood with Bundy at Bunkerville, at Malheur, or afterward," Stern wrote. "None of them would condemn ICE, and some expressed enthusiastic support."

Nick Ramlow, a Montana militant and member of Bundy’s People’s Rights Network who once warned a sheriff that he "had a bigger army than he does," argued that a jury would "make a determination of liability when a civil suit is brought" in Good's death, while Eric Parker, who pointed a semiautomatic rifle on federal agents at Bundy Ranch in 2014, had nothing but praise for the agent who killed the 37-year-old mother.

“I mostly think it’s important to note how impressive it was to get those first two shots off in under a second,” said Parker, who now leads the Real Three Percenters of Idaho. He added that Good's wife should face unspecified criminal charges.

Lee Rice, a longtime People’s Rights member and longtime Bundy supporter who participated in the Oregon standoff, has apparently drifted away from his 2023 statement that he didn’t “believe in the government running roughshod over you," Stern wrote.

“I’m supportive of what’s going on, because we need to get these clowns out of here," Rice said, adding that Good deserved her fate because she sided with undocumented immigrants.

Some of Bundy's associates did change their mind a bit about ICE after two Border Patrol agents shot and killed Pretti, who was legally carrying a firearm that Trump administration officials claimed justified his death.

“I feel completely different about this one,” Parker told Stern in a text message. “No detainment just fighting. Disarmed him then shot him.”

However, Bundy said most of his former allies, much to his astonishment, broadly supported the masked federal agents shooting and roughing up Americans and immigrants alike.

“We agreed that there’s certain rights that a person has that they’re born with," he told Stern. "Everybody has them equally, not just in the United States. But on this topic they are willing to completely abandon that principle.”

“"It doesn’t make sense to me,” Bundy added. “It’s scary, actually.”