It seemed like a typical congressional meeting for the Republic of Texas. Senators and the president gathered in the center of a Bryan, Texas, meeting hall, surrounded by public onlookers, to debate issues of the national currency, develop international relations and celebrate the birthday of one of their oldest members.
But this wasn't 1836, and this would be no ordinary legislative conference. Minutes into the meeting a man among the onlookers stood and moved to open the hall door, letting in an armed and armored force of the Bryan Police Department, the Brazos County Sheriff's Office, the Kerr County Sheriff's Office, Agents of the Texas District Attorney, the Texas Rangers and the FBI.
In the end, at least 20 officers corralled, searched and fingerprinted all 60 meeting attendees, before seizing all cellphones and recording equipment in a Valentine's Day 2015 raid on the Texas separatist group.
This came as some surprise to the old farts who seemed to think since they had elected themselves senators, land commissioners, and judges that they actually had some kind of power in the state.
The raid was a response to legal summons sent by Republic of Texas members to a Kerr County judge and bank employee, demanding they appear in the Republic's court at the Veterans and Foreign Wars building in Bryan the day the officers stormed in.
"You can't just let people go around filing false documents to judges trying to make them appear in front of courts that aren't even real courts," said Kerr County sheriff Rusty Hierholzer, who led the operation.
He acknowledged he used a "show of force," grouping officers from city, county state and federal law enforcement to serve a search warrant for suspicions of a misdemeanor crime. He said he had worries that some extremists in the group could become violent, citing a 1997 incident when 300 state troopers surrounded an armed Republic leader for a weeklong standoff.
This may seem like an overuse of force, however it should be noted that Alaska's own domestic terrorist Schaeffer Cox attempted similar sovereign citizen fake legal procedures before finally becoming fed up and planning to kidnap and murder judges and state troopers.
Other sovereign citizen groups have also turned to violence.
This is from the Homeland Security report on Sovereign Citizen Extremist violence:
When sovereigns do plan an attack in advance, the report suggests that this tends to be "in direct response to an ongoing personal grievance, such as an arrest or court order." It argues that sovereign citizens are unlikely to pick a symbolic target—like, say, the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City—and that in this way they are distinct from the killers who attacked two randomly selected cops in Las Vegas last year or three TSA officers at an L.A. airport the year before that.
According to this documentary the Republic of Texas group is firmly convinced that the federal and state government has no jurisdiction over the people of Texas, and that they are not required to follow any of their laws. (I mean they even print their own money for fuck's sake.)
Obviously they were wrong.
