Ammon Bundy seems to be running one of the most unusual campaigns for Idaho governor in the state’s history—primarily by getting himself arrested serially on a wide variety of charges, all of them variations on his long-running self-martyrdom schtick. The latest arrest happened over the weekend after Bundy tried to retrieve the grandson of one of his close associates from the hospital where state Child Protective Services had taken him.
Claiming it was a case of “medical kidnapping,” Bundy turned up early Saturday morning at St. Luke’s Meridian Medical Center demanding the release of 10-month-old Cyrus Anderson, who had been brought there by police. He was suffering from malnourishment after being confiscated from his parents earlier that day. When Bundy refused to leave, Meridian police took him into custody on suspicion of trespassing. In the ensuing furor, right-wing extremists have doxxed health care, social workers, and police officers involved in the case—which in turn has been spread even farther by Republican legislators.
The arrest occurred just two days before Bundy was due in court for his Monday trial on trespassing charges. Those charges were filed after he was arrested twice in two days at the statehouse in Boise in 2020 after being banned from entry while leading a right-wing invasion there.
Bundy’s arrest on Saturday, however, fueled a protest outside St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center later that afternoon as about 140 members of his “People’s Rights Network” and its affiliated “Health Freedom Network” gathered outside the hospital with signs protesting the “medical kidnapping” and defending “parental rights.”
Signs read “Honor Your Oath,” “Baby Cyrus Needs His Mother,” and “Babies Are Not State Property.”
Meridian police issued a statement on Saturday giving the official sequence of events: The baby had been hospitalized earlier this month with extreme malnutrition, they said, and discharged a few days later. However, at a follow-up appointment earlier this week, doctors found that he had again lost a significant amount of weight and scheduled an immediate followup—but his parents failed to show up with him, and then couldn’t be located.
The boy’s father was finally contacted by Health and Welfare officials, who arranged for him to bring the boy in for examination—but once again, the father failed to show up. Meridian police went to the parents’ home, but people there refused to let them check on the child. They obtained a warrant and went back, found the parents had fled, issued a bulletin, and the parents were pulled over by Garden City Police in a traffic stop.
When the police took the infant into their custody, the boy’s mother and his aunt allegedly resisted their efforts and were arrested and charged with obstructing an officer. The boy was then taken to St. Luke’s Meridian and treated.
That was when Bundy and his followers showed up at around 1:30 AM and began badgering hospital officials to release the child. Bundy was arrested along with his campaign’s manager, Wendy Kay Whitaker, who tried to interfere with her boss’ arrest when they refused to leave.
“He was asked to leave the property and did not,” a hospital spokesperson told the Idaho Statesman.
Bundy claimed on Twitter that he had been “arrested for the crime of disagreeing with the hospital and CPS. Make no mistake about it, this was an ambush arrest with no legal grounds.”
He claimed that “baby Cyrus had been medically kidnapped,” and dismissed the matter as just “a missed non-emergency doctors appointment.” He added: “Ask yourself this, if they can revoke your parental rights and take custody of your child over a missed doctor appointment, what else can they do and how did they get this power? … Idaho must unite against medical tyranny and take back our rights.”
“We have just become such a pro-police state,” Bundy said the next day at the protest in Boise. He said the state’s conduct was “disparaging,” adding: “That child does not belong to the state. That child belongs to their parents.”
Janice McGeachin, Idaho’s militia-friendly lieutenant governor, tried to weigh in on the controversy, posting a video complaining that when she had tried to inquire about the case, state Child Protective Services officials would not share any information (likely citing federal HIPAA health privacy laws). McGeachin, who is running in the GOP primary for governor (and recently created a firestorm by addressing a white nationalist convention), seemingly interpreted this as a kind of insubordination of her august self.
“They wouldn’t talk to us because of the reason that their staff members were concerned about security issues,” she said. “So this is a problem, that the lieutenant governor of Idaho cannot know what is happening in our state. And the governor and the director and the department will not speak to the lieutenant governor of Idaho on this situation.”
The toddler at the center of the dispute is the grandson of Diego Rodriguez, the pastor of a Boise-area Christian “Dominionist” church, which has been a close ally of Bundy during his crusade against coronavirus-related health measures since the pandemic’s outbreak in 2020. Rodriguez, who has previously run for office in Idaho, ran an April 2020 Easter service in Emmett with Bundy, as well as guest speaker Wayne Hoffman of the Idaho Freedom Foundation.
On “Patriot” Telegram channels popular with Bundy’s followers, supporters began posting the personal information of the arresting officers. At the site of Rodriguez’s PAC, Freedom Man, he posted a long screed that “Baby Cyrus Was Kidnapped!” and claiming that the child has been harmed while in the hospital’s care. He also insisted that Meridian police’s characterization of the reasons for the arrest were “an outright lie” that was “obviously designed to make it look as if Levi and Marissa were not taking care of Cyrus.”
Rodriguez included four photos, complete with names and other identifying information of “The Main People Responsible for Baby Cyrus’ Kidnapping”—a medical professional, two police officers, and a female African American social worker. Two Republican Idaho House members—Priscilla Giddings of White Bird and Karey Hanks of St. Anthony—shared Rodriguez’s video doxxing the health care workers with their constituents on Facebook and Twitter.
Bundy had been banned from the Idaho Statehouse building in 2020 for his obstreperous attempts to lead a “people’s rights” revolt against Idaho state leadership during the opening days of a special legislative session intended to deal with pandemic-related state business. After leading a rowdy crowd of protesters who pushed past state troopers, broke a glass door, and filled both legislative galleries and committee-hearing rooms beyond social distancing requirements, Bundy was arrested the next day (and banned for a year from the statehouse) for refusing to leave a hearing room—and then arrested again the day after that for ignoring the ban.
Bundy’s COVID denialism campaign, moreover, has been a pretext for him to organize and recruit a theocratic army in the form of his People’s Rights network. Since founding it in 2020, Bundy and his cohort have been expanding its reach, in part by adapting to current news for fresh issues to which they can attach their brand of extremist protest—particularly as pandemic-related restrictions have gradually receded.
It was only a matter of time before they figured out a new protest/fundraising/recruitment angle—even if they had to concoct it themselves out of their own misfortunes.
