The request from nine organizations in a letter sent on Monday to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has the potential to increase tensions in the debate over federal control over vast areas in the West.

The BLM had previously seized Bundy’s cattle for illegally grazing on federal land. However, it backed down in 2014, releasing the livestock to end a standoff with hundreds of armed protesters who came to support the rancher in the Nevada desert.

With Bundy currently jailed in Nevada on charges stemming from the standoff, his relatives have allowed hundreds of cattle to graze on public land around the family’s ranch, said Rob Mrowka, a scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that sent the letter.

The groups are asking the BLM to seize the cattle from the Bundy family, whose ranch is less than 130 km northeast of Las Vegas, and send the animals to farms or sell them for slaughter.

“We recognize that the cattle roundup of 2014 failed due to real threats to agency personnel,” Travis Bruner, executive director of Western Watersheds Project, one of the groups that signed the letter, said in a statement.

“Those ‘threats’ are now mostly imprisoned and awaiting trial, but the crimes against desert tortoise continue,” Bruner said.

BLM spokesman Ronald Evenson said in a statement, “Mr. Bundy’s cattle continue to be in trespass.”

But Evenson said the agency has no immediate plans to round them up, because it continues to work with the U.S. Department of Justice on legal cases against Bundy and others.

Bundy, 70, whose sons led an armed occupation earlier this year at a wildlife refuge in Oregon, was arrested in February at the Portland airport.

He has been indicted on charges that included conspiracy and assault on a law enforcement officer.

Bundy’s sons, Ammon and Ryan, were indicted in connection with the Oregon occupation and face charges in the Nevada standoff. The family is popular with anti-government groups.

Bundy on Tuesday sued President Barack Obama, U.S. Senator Harry Reid and the judge in his criminal case, accusing them of violating his constitutional rights.

— Reporting for Reuters by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles.

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The move by the Obama administration came after shippers vowed to prevent the loading and unloading of freight through Monday from container ships at the 29 ports, barring a settlement in talks with the dockworkers’ union.

The shipping companies said they were unwilling to pay union workers higher wages for weekend shifts and the Presidents Day holiday on Monday while productivity declines and cargo backups reach the point of near gridlock, after months of chronic congestion in freight traffic.

The impact of the dispute has rippled through the U.S. commercial supply chain, slowing deliveries of a wide range of goods, from agricultural produce to housewares and apparel.

“The negotiations over the functioning of the West Coast ports have been taking place for months with the administration urging the parties to resolve their differences,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said.

“Out of concern for the economic consequences of further delay, the president has directed his Secretary of Labor Tom Perez to travel to California to meet with the parties to urge them to resolve their dispute quickly at the bargaining table.”

Perez has been in contact with the parties and will keep the president updated, he said.

On Friday, negotiators for the union representing 20,000 dockworkers at the ports and management’s bargaining agent, the Pacific Maritime Association, agreed to a federal mediator’s request for a 48-hour news blackout. The two sides held a bargaining session on Thursday that marked their first face-to-face meeting in nearly a week.

The association has said the talks hit a new snag over a demand by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union for changes in the system of binding arbitration in contract disputes.

Retailers had long pressed President Barack Obama to intervene in the dispute. In a statement, a National Retail Federation official welcomed the White House announcement.

“The slowdowns, congestion and suspensions at the West Coast ports need to end now,” said the statement from Jonathan Gold, the federation’s vice president for supply chain.

By Saturday morning, 32 freighters were waiting to dock at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, which are the nation’s two busiest cargo hubs, said Lee Peterson, a spokesman for the port of Long Beach.

Shippers first suspended vessel operations at the ports for two days last weekend and again on Thursday, a union holiday. Port operations resumed in full for one eight-hour shift on Friday before the loading and unloading of container ships was halted again.

The West Coast ports were not left entirely dormant. The companies said work continues in the dockyards, rail yards and terminal gates as they seek to clear some of the cargo containers already stacked up on the waterfronts.

— Alex Dobuzinskis reports for Reuters from Los Angeles. Additional reporting for Reuters by Jeff Mason in San Francisco.

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The findings by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, were published in the online edition of the journal Science.

The researchers relied on data from global positioning system (GPS) stations throughout the West, measuring how much GPS sensors showed the land had risen beneath them.

The uplift is the largest in the U.S. West since researchers began using GPS data 10 years ago. The researchers did not find the uplift has any effect on the likelihood of earthquakes.

The research underscores the severity of the drought in the West, which in California is expected to cost the state economy $2.2 billion in lost crops, jobs and other damages.

The 63 trillion gallons of water missing in the U.S. West is the equivalent of a four-inch (10-cm) layer of water spread across the entire region, researchers found.

On average, the loss of water resulted in an average uplift of the land in the West of four millimetres (0.15 inch), with up to 15 millimetres (0.6 inch) of uplift seen in California’s mountains, according to Scripps.

“The amount of uplift that occurs from 2013 onward both in the magnitude and extent was unlike anything in the GPS record that we had,” said Scripps researcher Adrian Borsa. “We were tremendously surprised that nobody had found it before, we considered ourselves very lucky.”

The water that has left the West has not simply disappeared, it has just been redistributed to other parts of the globe, he said.

The GPS systems used for the study were originally deployed for the study of plate tectonics.

But this novel use of the data, especially due to its value in estimating changes in underground aquifers and in snowcaps, could help officials in charge of water management plan for how to distribute the valuable natural resource, researchers said.

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