Ammon Bundy has been back in the news of late.

No, he is not involved in another armed standoff with the federal government, like he was in 2016 as the leader of an armed takeover at an Oregon wildlife refuge, and two years before that, a similar standoff over the rights to graze cattle on federal land near his father’s ranch in Nevada.

One of the figureheads of the anti-government sentiment that crested with the rise of Donald Trump, Bundy made waves last week when he criticized the president for demonizing the migrant caravan at the southern border. The statements were striking for a figure so closely identified with the country’s libertarian and anti-government right-wing.

And on Friday, BuzzFeed News reported that Bundy was “quitting the militia movement,” while powering down his social media accounts due to the backlash he’d received for his rebuke of Trump. The story drew a flurry of headlines, like “Ammon Bundy Quits Militia Movement in Solidarity With Migrant Caravan.”

When reached by phone on Friday, Bundy disputed the framing of the BuzzFeed story, but admitted that he was frustrated with some of the elements of the right-wing groups for whom he’s served as an informal leader.

“I never joined a movement,” he said by phone. “We were a ranching family. We were ranching and the government came to take our livelihood away and we said ‘no.’ It was no more than that.”

He said the only real announcement he had made was that he was unplugging from Facebook, after being surprised by the angry response to his remarks on the caravan. His decision to speak out came after his views were solicited on the issue, and he sought to do some research to figure out how he felt about it, he said.

“I was asked multiple times from different various individuals what I thought about these caravans, and I didn’t know, to be honest with you, I didn’t know the facts,” he said. “So I began to research and try to determine the facts.”

His verdict on the caravan, which he delivered in a 17-minute video at the time, broke sharply with Trump-aligned orthodoxy on the issue. In the run up to the midterm elections, Trump repeatedly disparaged the caravan as an “invasion” requiring the deployment of military troops.

“He has basically called them all criminals,” Bundy said of Trump in the video. “What about the fathers, the mothers, the children, who have come here and are willing to go through the process to apply for asylum so they can come into this country and benefit from not having to be oppressed continually by criminals?”

Bundy, whose family’s selective interpretation of Mormonism under-girds their anti-government views, said his views on the migrants were motivated in part by his religious faith. He criticized partisan-inflected media coverage of the caravan from both the right and the left, and said the assertions that they were being paid by George Soros or are terrorists to be “a bunch of garbage.”

The reaction was swift.

Some former supporters who had traveled to his father’s ranch in 2014 expressed regret. Others went further, accusing Bundy of being paid by “globalists.” His page was filled with comments criticizing his stance.

“The facts were rejected,” Bundy told The Post. “I could only see that 99 percent of it was that same Trump rhetoric of calling all these people terrorists. And they’d pick out an isolated issue, and go ‘oh look 40 of them are charging the border so all 5,000 of them are bad. … These refugees are not all the same. They didn’t come from the same places. They didn’t even come from the same country.”

Dr. Sam Jackson, an expert on far-right extremism at the University at Albany’s College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity, wondered if Trump’s treatment of immigrants cut too close to a history that feels all-too-near for Mormons.

Adherents to the faith were persecuted in the United States in the 1800s before seeking out a new home in a part of North America that was then outside the country’s borders: present day Utah.

“They identify with the stranger,” Jackson said.

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