imagine this nightmare you return to
your home one evening and you find
someone is squatting there
that just happened to a newark woman who
needed to have a swat team
remove the man from her home in this
particular case
the squatter was part of what's known as
the sovereign citizen movement
the fbi calls it an extremist movement
and it's been around for decades in new
jersey
leah mishkin reports as part of
exploring hate
our ongoing series of reports on
anti-semitism
racism and extremism
in dozens of tick-tock videos a newark
woman tells her story of buying a home
that was bank owned
closing in february and getting a
renovation loan she says she's still
waiting to get the work done but she
goes every weekend
to check on her house one day she
realized her locks were changed
then her new neighbor said his wife met
her husband
i said sir
i don't have a husband so now like i
am inside freaking out it turns out she
says the man is a sovereign citizen
from morocco who believes the house is
his ancestral land
and has been squatting in her home the
fbi describes the sovereign citizen
movement as anti-government extremists
who believe that even though they
physically reside in this country
they're separate or sovereign from the
united states
they believe that our governments the
federal government but also often state
or local governments too
is actually illegitimate and has no
jurisdiction or authority over them mark
pittkavich with the anti-defamation
league says many of the pioneers of the
sovereign citizen movement in the 70s
and 80s were white supremacists over the
decades
the percentage of people with white
supremacist beliefs in the movement
consistently decreased and in fact by
the 1990s
people of color were beginning to join
the movement and
especially over the past 10 years that
has consistently increased
the extremist group tends to grow during
tough economic times pitcaivic says
it's a situation they try to exploit the
sovereign citizen movement has had a
long history
in in new jersey one of the things that
sovereign citizens do
is this idea of sort of squatting and
they will go and try
to claim ownership of it and possession
of it
so many times they'll actually file
paperwork with like a county clerk
um or at the state level thinking that
this is actually going to provide them
legal ownership of the property which it
does not
rachel goldwasser is a research analyst
at southern poverty law center focusing
on anti-government groups
do you fear that this movement will grow
given the pandemic
i absolutely worry i mean you know this
is one of the things that keeps me up at
night
is that this movement although many
people in it are
non-violent there are a number of people
in the movement that are violent or are
promoting violence
um or are working with other extremists
sovereign citizens can go from zero to
60 in their
terms of their you know their anger
levels very quickly and so we get a lot
of spontaneous violence
so there have been sovereign citizens
willing to kill police officers
over a simple traffic stop for speeding
there have been plots by sovereign
citizens in recent years to kidnap
judges
to take over the state of west virginia
sovereign citizens also engage in a lot
of white-collar crime
particularly scams and and frauds they
like to
file fraudulent liens with their county
clerks
and what they're doing is they're filing
those against other people often public
officials right so a police officer that
arrested them for instance or a judge
that found them guilty police officer or
the judge they don't know
often that they have that lien until
they go to take out a loan or to buy a
home
and they can't do it essentially they go
after people that they believe are going
after them what we call that is paper
terrorism and so that's the type of
thing that we do
do keep an eye on because that does
cross into the criminal realm lori duran
is new jersey office of homeland
security acting director
is paper terrorism on the rise that's
something i really can't go into a lot
of detail with
um just based on the sensitivities but
um
but it does exist many states actually
do not have laws
that prevent sovereigns from filing
these liens
but the great news is that new jersey
actually does
now those new laws primarily safeguarded
public employees and their families so
this might be an isolated incident but
the homeowner did have to have police
intervene
captured on tick swat arriving to the
scene
and the man being carried into a police
car we got him
for nj spotlight news i'm leah mishkin
major funding for exploring hate has
been provided by
the sylvia a and simon b poiter
programming endowment to fight
anti-semitism
the peter g peterson
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