The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints settled in a remote area along the Arizona-Utah border in the 1930s after the polygamist sect broke away from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the mainstream Mormon church that renounced plural marriage in 1890.
The FLDS controlled the municipal governments and shared police force in neighboring Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, for decades. But the sect's leader and prophet, Warren Jeffs, was convicted in 2011 of sexually assaulting two girls. And federal prosecutors accused the towns of denying basic services such as water hookups and police protection to nonbelievers, leading to a 2017 order placing the towns under court supervision.
