Sovereign Citizenship: Lawful Or Lawless?

The sovereign citizen movement is a loose group of anti-government activists, litigants, tax protesters, financial scammers, and conspiracy theorists. Sovereign citizens have their own pseudolegal belief system based on misinterpretations of common law and claim to not be subject to any government statutes unless they consent to them. They believe that the original government set up by the US founders, which most adherents refer to as common law, was slowly and secretly replaced by an illegitimate government sometime in the 1800s. They believe there is a legal way to opt out of the current legal system by filing documents and ending what they view as contracts with the government, such as driving licenses and other identity documents. Sovereign citizens engage in a large amount of criminal activity, including harassment and retaliation tactics, scams and frauds, and violence.

Sovereign citizens' pseudo-legal arguments

The sovereign citizen movement is a loose group of anti-government activists, litigants, tax protesters, financial scammers, and conspiracy theorists. Sovereign citizens have their own pseudo-legal belief system based on misinterpretations of common law and claim to not be subject to any government statutes unless they consent to them. The movement's pseudo-legal arguments are flawed and have no basis in law.

Sovereign citizens believe that courts have no jurisdiction over people and that the use of certain procedures can make one immune to government laws and regulations. They also regard most forms of taxation as illegitimate and reject Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, and vehicle registration.

Sovereign citizens believe that the state is not an actual government, but a corporation. They claim that the corporation that purports to be the U.S. federal government is illegally controlling the republic via a territorial government in Washington, DC. They believe that when the government set up by the Founding Fathers under a common law legal system was secretly replaced, commercial law substituted common law. This commercial law is generally understood to be admiralty law, as sovereign citizens consider that the current, illegitimate law is based on principles of international commerce.

Sovereign citizens believe that the appearance of gold fringes on American flags displayed in courtrooms is evidence of admiralty law being in effect. This leads them to believe that U.S. judges and lawyers are agents of a foreign power, typically the United Kingdom. They will, therefore, challenge the validity of the contemporary legal system and claim to answer only to God's law or to common law.

Sovereign citizens believe that statutory law is a contract binding people to the state. They think that people are tricked into this contract through various things, including Social Security numbers, fishing licenses, or ZIP Codes. They claim that they can opt out of the purported contract and make themselves immune from the laws they do not wish to abide by, by declining to "consent". When confronted by police officers or other officials, sovereign citizens will typically attempt to negate their authority by stating, "I do not consent."

Sovereign citizens believe that the Uniform Commercial Code, which provides an interstate standard for documents, applies only to their strawman. They consider that exploiting supposed loopholes in the UCC will help them assert their rights or invoke their special privileges and powers as "common law citizens."

Adherents to the "American State National" concept believe that, through a specific procedure, they can renounce federal citizenship, make themselves immune from jurisdiction and arrest, avoid the IRS, and also rescind voting registration, marriage, or birth certificates.

Criminal activity by sovereign citizens

Sovereign citizens are a loose group of anti-government activists, litigants, tax protesters, financial scammers, and conspiracy theorists. While the majority of sovereign citizens are non-violent, their methods are illegal, and some have engaged in armed confrontations with law enforcement. Sovereign citizens have been found guilty of a range of criminal offences, including tax evasion, hostile possession, forgery, threatening public officials, bank fraud, and traffic violations.

Sovereign citizens believe that they are not subject to any government statutes unless they consent to them. They believe that the original government set up by the US founders, which most adherents refer to as "common law", was slowly and secretly replaced by an illegitimate government sometime in the 1800s. They believe that there is a legal way to opt out of the current legal system by filing documents and ending what they view as "contracts" with the government, such as driving licences and other identity documents.

Sovereign citizens have been known to create their own irregular, pseudolegal documents, including false passports, license plates, or birth certificates. They also use flawed or invented legal arguments, or irregular documents that may have been bought from other movement members, as "proof" of their claims.

Sovereign citizens' tactics often succeed in delaying legal proceedings and may occasionally confuse or exhaust public officials. However, their arguments are never upheld in court. Their claims have been consistently rejected by courts in various countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Sovereign citizens have been known to engage in criminal activity, including financial scams, impersonating or threatening law enforcement officials, and even killing law enforcement officers. In 2010, two Arkansas police officers stopped sovereign-citizen extremists Jerry Kane and his 16-year-old son Joseph during a routine traffic stop. Joseph Kane jumped out of the vehicle and opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle, killing both officers. Since 2000, lone-offender sovereign-citizen extremists have killed six law enforcement officers.

Sovereign citizens have also been known to run fraudulent insurance schemes, sell phony diplomatic credentials, and launder money. They also sell fraudulent documents—including drivers’ licenses, passports, diplomat identification, vehicle registrations, concealed firearms permits, law enforcement credentials, and insurance forms—to other sovereign citizens and illegal immigrants.

Sovereign citizens often produce documents that contain peculiar or out-of-place language. They may also carry fraudulent drivers’ licenses to indicate their view that law enforcement does not have the authority to stop their vehicle or may write “No Liability Accepted” above their signature on a driver’s license to signify that they do not accept it as a legitimate identification document.

Sovereign citizens also intimidate, obstruct, and harass law enforcement, court, and government officials, as well as financial institution employees. Their methods can range from refusing to cooperate with requests, demanding an oath of office or proof of jurisdiction, filming interactions with law enforcement that they later post on the Internet, and filing frivolous lawsuits or liens against real property. They also convene their own special courts that issue fake but realistic-looking indictments, warrants, and other documents.

The sovereign citizens movement is a growing domestic threat to law enforcement. It is important that law enforcement be aware of sovereign citizens’ tactics so agencies can warn the public of potential scams, spot illegal activity and understand its potential severity, and be prepared for and protect against violent behavior or backlash through intimidation and harassment.

Sovereign citizens' belief in a secret government-held fund

Sovereign citizens believe that the government set up by the Founding Fathers under a common-law legal system was secretly replaced by an illegitimate government sometime in the 1800s. This illegitimate government, they claim, swapped common law for admiralty law or maritime law.

Sovereign citizens believe that the replacement occurred during the Civil War, or in 1933, when the U.S. abandoned the gold standard. They believe that the U.S. dollar is no longer backed by gold but by the "full faith and credit" of the federal government. They claim that the government has pledged its citizenry as collateral by selling their future earning capabilities to foreign investors, effectively enslaving all Americans.

Sovereign citizens believe that this sale takes place at birth with the issuance of a birth certificate and the advice to apply for a Social Security Number. They say that the government then uses that birth certificate to set up a corporate trust in the baby's name – a secret U.S. Treasury account – funded with amounts ranging from $600,000 to $20 million.

Sovereign citizens believe that by setting up this Treasury Direct Account (TDA), every newborn’s rights are split between those held by the flesh-and-blood baby and the ones assigned to his or her corporate shell account. They claim that most certificates use all capital letters to spell out a baby’s name – “JOHN DOE,” for example. They falsely attribute this all-capital version to the actual name of the corporate shell identity, also called a “straw man,” while “John Doe” without all caps is the baby’s “real,” flesh-and-blood name.

Sovereign citizens believe that, as the child grows older, most of his legal documents will utilize capital letters, which means that his state-issued driver’s license, marriage license, car registration, criminal court records, cable TV bill and correspondence from the IRS will pertain to his corporate shell identity, not his real, sovereign identity.

They believe that, by filing a series of complex, legal-sounding documents, they can tap into this secret treasury account. For decades, sovereigns have attempted to perfect the process by packaging and promoting different combinations of forms and paperwork. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) states that the notion of "secret accounts assigned to each citizen is pure fantasy".

Scams and frauds by sovereign citizens

The Sovereign Citizen movement is a loose network of anti-government extremists who believe that the federal, state, and local governments operate illegally. Sovereign citizens are known for their pseudo-legal arguments and other unusual behaviours, such as inserting punctuation marks in their names or flouting motor vehicle regulations. They believe that they can ignore laws, regulations, court orders, and taxes because they have divorced themselves from what they claim is an illegitimate, tyrannical government.

Sovereign citizens engage in a large amount of criminal activity, including scams and frauds, sometimes on a large scale. Here are some examples:

• In July 2023, Kartarius Johnson (aka Tareeq Akhil Anad) received a 20-year federal prison sentence in a federal courthouse in Mobile, Alabama, on charges that included wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and making false statements to government agencies. Johnson, a sovereign citizen, had run a multi-faceted fraud scheme targeting financial institutions and government agencies, including the Small Business Administration, from which he obtained COVID-19 relief funds.
• In July 2022, sovereign citizen Alice Felder-Lucas of Columbia, South Carolina, received a federal sentence of more than three years after fraudulently obtaining a federal tax refund of more than $700,000 from the IRS.
• In December 2022, David Isagba pleaded guilty to charges related to a scheme where he and his wife filed for nearly $3 billion in fraudulent tax returns over a decade. The IRS caught most of the phony claims, but not all, resulting in a $5.8 million payment to the Isagbas, which they used to buy a house and luxury vehicles.
• In May 2022, a Tennessee sovereign, Erica A. Elliott, was sentenced to a diversion program after pleading guilty to forgery and bogus lien charges for having filed a bogus lien for $19 million on a mansion in Knoxville, Tennessee, in an apparent attempt to claim an ownership stake.
• In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic offered sovereign citizen scammers new opportunities. Some, like Amos Mundendi, a Texas sovereign and “Moorish National,” sought to defraud the government. Mundendi and several accomplices created straw companies to falsely obtain $30 million in COVID-19 relief funds from the Small Business Association. Convicted on fraud charges, Mundendi received a 42-month prison sentence in 2023.
• In 2020, Utah sovereign Gordon Pedersen peddled “structural alkaline silver” as a cure for the coronavirus, claiming that the substance “resonates…at a frequency that destroys the membrane of the virus.” When indicted on federal fraud charges, Pedersen fled instead of appearing in court in 2020 but was tracked down and caught in August 2023.
• In 2020, Kevin Martin, an Arizona sovereign citizen, was arrested on fraud charges after he allegedly used bogus checks to purchase an Aston Martin and a Mercedes, as well as $226,000 in gold coins.
• In 2022, a Rhode Island sovereign unsuccessfully tried to use a “certificate of deposit” to buy a Range Rover in Boston.
• In April 2023, Verdell Terria Jones pleaded guilty to using counterfeit U.S. Treasury checks to purchase a vehicle in Jacksonville, Florida. She was arrested in 2017 but became a fugitive rather than face trial and was only caught in April 2023.
• In 2023, a Massachusetts sovereign, Nathan McGuire, sent a bogus sovereign citizen money order for $5 million to an investment company, then sued the company when it ignored the fictitious instrument.

Sovereign citizens' confrontations, threats and violence

Sovereign citizens are a loosely affiliated group of individuals who believe that the US government is illegitimate and that they are therefore not subject to its laws. While the majority of sovereign citizens are not violent, some have engaged in armed confrontations with law enforcement, leading the FBI to classify "sovereign citizen extremists" as domestic terrorists.

Sovereign citizens are known to violently confront police, both in the US and abroad. In one instance, a sovereign citizen in Singapore refused to wear a mask during the COVID-19 pandemic, telling people: "I'm a sovereign... This is something people are not going to know what it is... It means I have no contract with the police, it means I have no say over me". In Australia, police attributed a rise in people resisting lockdown orders—sometimes violently—to the sovereign citizen movement.

Sovereign citizens pose a unique and significant threat to law enforcement during traffic stops. They consistently refuse to follow basic traffic laws, such as using driver's licenses, valid license plates, and registering or insuring their vehicles. When stopped for a traffic violation, sovereign citizens can become argumentative and combative, often employing conflict-oriented tactics such as demanding that officers prove their jurisdiction or refusing to answer questions. This can lead to long, protracted interactions that can turn deadly.

Sovereign citizens have also been known to set up their own "common law courts" and issue bogus arrest warrants for US officials. They have also been implicated in adverse possession of properties, including squatting in homes facing foreclosure.

Sovereign citizens have committed violent acts against law enforcement officers, including shooting and killing officers during traffic stops and ambushes. In one instance, a sovereign citizen shot and killed a California Highway Patrol officer after being pulled over for an obstructed license plate. In another case, a sovereign citizen shot at officers during an eviction, killing one officer and wounding two others.

Sovereign citizens have also made threats of harm against law enforcement. In one instance, a sovereign citizen plotted to kidnap a law enforcement officer, hold them hostage, and put a "bullet in his head". In another case, a sovereign citizen sent private messages to the police, stating that he had "the right to kill a cop who violates my constitutional rights when I am exercising them".

Sovereign citizens pose a significant threat to law enforcement due to their rejection of government authority and willingness to engage in violent confrontations. Their ideology and tactics, which often involve paper terrorism and the use of pseudo-legal arguments, can lead to dangerous situations, particularly during traffic stops and other interactions with police.

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