Dakota access pipeline protest draws to a close

The Standing Rock Sioux tribe asked protesters to leave the area in December, but around 300 pipeline opponents stayed at the Oceti Sakowin camp.

This morning, about 100 people remained on site, with some torching structures within the camp they called “ceremonial fires”.

Two checkpoints manned by state and federal agencies, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the North Dakota Highway Patrol, have been set up to make sure protesters who leave the camp can not return.

In the snowcapped Oceti Sakowin campsite in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, several activists broadcast from numerous Facebook Live feeds as protesters braced for what is likely a bitter end to a months-long resistance to the pipeline.

“I continue to protest the injustice of this administration to override Native Americans’ input and rights”, Mehan said, referring to the president’s executive action to advance the pipeline.

“We are not going to do anything negative”.

Morton County sheriff’s deputies can arrest people who won’t leave.

Prompted by an unusually warm winter, on February 2 North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum issued an emergency order for the protestors to leave their campsites on the banks of the Cannonball River by 2 p.m. Wednesday. The protest camp is on Army Corps of Engineers land nearby. “I want people to be safe on both sides”.

It is unknown exactly how many protesters have accepted help from a travel assistance center, which offers free bus tickets and a one-night hotel voucher among other services.

Police in the United States have begun arresting protesters opposed to the building of an oil pipeline in North Dakota.

Numerous 200 to 300 protesters peacefully vacated the camp hours earlier today, the Associated Press reported.

Since August, the state has spent at least $8.7 million policing the protests, the North Dakota National Guard said.

Findley says a large number of armored vehicles have lined the roads along the camp. It’s not immediately clear how many protesters have been arrested. “If this whole thing started around the idea of being protectors, it’s just an unbelievable irony that there are people who are preventing access to federally owned lands to conduct a cleanup of stuff in a floodplain”. The cost of the contract for cleanup is $800,000 but could rise to more than $1.1 million. More than 230 truckloads of garbage had been hauled away as of Monday, according to The Associated Press.