Since the 1980s, the movement known as the Sovereign Citizen Movement has experienced a growth spurt, its members reaching far and wide from state to state. The group has increasingly engaged in filing false liens, documents claims put on someone’s property to collect debt, against government and law officials.
This has been the case for several government and law officials in the past years, and the number of victims is on the rise. They find themselves facing liens put on one or more of their properties along with million-dollar debts. While these attacks appear almost random, they tend to be an act by a particular movement that seeks to rectify what they call “injustices.”
The Sovereign Citizen Movement is a long running, loosely organized group that has been on the rise in the past couple of years. While they can trace their origins to white supremacy groups, the ideology spans multiple ethnicity and races. Their general belief revolves around the idea that the government works “illegally” and that the government has a “straw man” representing each of their citizens.
To differentiate from this “straw man,” members have been known create their own licenses and currency. They also have the habit of signing their names with varying lower and upper case letters and random colons and apostrophes.
Recently, independently acting sovereign citizens have been the center of violent crimes. In August, two members of the movement were arrested after an undercover scope found that they were planning to kidnap and murder police officers after a played out “sovereign” court would find them guilty of “stopping liberty.” In 2010, a father and son claiming to be sovereign citizens killed two police officers in a routine traffic stop.
Full-out violence isn’t the norm for the members of the movement. Instead, they tend to specialize in what the FBI calls “paper terrorism.” Along with filing fraudulent liens, the movement has been known for debt evasion, mortgage fraud, and false tax reimbursement collection. The group only congregates in seminars, where “gurus” teach members how to file documents and pull off such heists.
The movement has attracted many con artists and the financially desperate. But those are not the only people getting involved. “…we’ve seen airline pilots, we’ve seen federal law enforcement officers, we’ve seen city councilmen and millionaires get involved with this movement,” said Mark Pitcavage, the director of investigative research for the Anti-Defamation League, to the New York Times.
While the issue has been growing larger and larger as more and more take up the ideology, many officials either don’t take heed or are unaware of the movement until they become a target. The movement has spread to Canada as well, where many have already claimed themselves free of the government.
Sovereign citizens have been assisted in their false lien filing with the fact that in most states, the secretary of state has to accept all liens filed, no questions asked. More states are beginning to take action, filing laws that will allow them to have a bigger say on which liens were accepted and which weren’t as true claims. States have also been hardening their penalties against those filing false documents against others.
Recently, a couple from Minnesota was sentenced to 23 months in prison after a three year spree of filing liens which together amounted to a hefty 250 billion sum in debt. They seem to be the first in such convictions, and only time will tell if this will be the gateway to more.
“It got me angry,” John Ristad, an assistant attorney who helped file the case against the couple, told the New York Times, “because at the end of the day, these two are bullies who think they can get their way by filing paper.”
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