Federal agents with a search warrant swarmed a home in Arizona with known links to a sect of the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, local news reported.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations reportedly sent agents from their Phoenix office on Tuesday to execute a search warrant on a property in Colorado City that residents confirmed belonged to 46-year-old Samuel Rappylee Bateman, St George News reported.
Social media videos posted online showed police vehicles outside the home and a police officer directing residents with a bullhorn to come outside of the property.
“I can confirm that the FBI has personnel in Colorado City today conducting court-authorized law enforcement activity,” Kevin Smith with the FBI in Phoenix said in an emailed statement to The Independent.
Local news outlets reported that several raids were conducted on the property, which kicked off at approximately 10.45am on Tuesday.
The news of the raid arrives just two weeks after Mr Bateman, who leads a break-off sect of the FLDS religion in Colorado City, was arrested by authorities after he’d been accused of transporting young girls in a locked cargo trailer toward Phoenix.
A police report, obtained by Fox News 13, details how Mr Bateman was pulled over near Flagstaff after they’d received multiple calls from people who had seen the man at a nearby gas station with children inside the locked cargo trailer.
When officers from the Arizona Highway Patrol pulled the 46-year-old, they found two girls in the pickup truck’s cab with the man and three additional girls between the ages of 11 and 15 years old inside the trailer, which was locked from the outside and reportedly had no ventilation, no lighting and no “restraint seating.”
The man explained that he was travelling to the Phoenix area with the girls, none of whom were his children, officers wrote. When questioned by authorities, the girls reportedly “all stated they were going somewhere in Phoenix or Tucson but didnt [sic] know length of time or purpose of trip.”
One of the mothers of two of the girls travelling with Mr Bateman was reached by police by phone and she reportedly told them that, “under the circumstances, I’m okay with my daughters being there, if they stay together,” Fox News 13 reported.
The 46-year-old was booked into the Coconino County Jail on suspicion of child abuse, documents stated.
The Independent contacted the FBI Arizona office for comment on the raids carried out in Colorado City on Tuesday but did not hear back immediately.
The raid at the Colorado City property arrives nearly 15 years to the day after FLDS the self-proclaimed "president and prophet" of the FLDS, Warren Jeffs, was convicted on being an accomplice to rape in September 2007.
Jeffs, 66, reportedly had 78 wives at the time of his arrest — twenty-four of which were under the age of 17, according to The Washington Post — and one legal spouse. Though his first conviction was overturned, the 66-year-old was subsequently convicted of aggravated sexual assault on a minor in Texas, where he remains in prison.
Jeffs has continued to lead the FLDS from prison, but Mr Bateman came out shortly after his arrest in 2006 to claim that he was the one to receive revelation for the FLDS religion.
