FBI agents led a raid on a Texas secessionist "court hearing" to which the group tried to summon a county judge with false legal documents.
The Houston Chronicle reported that the secessionist group believes that it lives in a country independent from the United States. Members of the group call it the Republic of Texas, and maintain "a small working government, including official currency, congress and courts" in Bryan, Texas.
Susan Cammak, a member of the group, recently had her house foreclosed by Kerr County in conjunction with a bank.
In response, David Kroupa, a judge of the unrecognized Republic, sent a legal summons to a Kerr County judge and an employee of the bank. The summons instructed the pair to appear Feb. 14, 2015, in the Republic's court at the Veterans and Foreign Wars building in Bryan.
Instead of the judge showing up for the Republic's summons, over 20 officers from federal, state, and local law enforcement departments busted into the meeting fully armed and armored on Valentine's Day. The FBI, Bryan Police Department, the Brazos County Sheriff's Office, the Kerr County Sheriff's Office, Agents of the Texas District Attorney, the Texas Rangers all had at least one officer on the team.
The law enforcement team corralled all 60 members of the Republic, and proceeded with fingerprinting, and seizures of cell phones and recording equipment. No arrests were made.
"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.
A search warrant enabling the raid said that the group was accused of "simulating legal process."
PennLive.com reported Monday that 15 towns in New York's Broome, Delaware, Tioga, and Sullivan counties that are interested in succeeding from the state and joining Pennsylvania. New York recently banned natural gas hydraulic fracturing, but in Pennsylvania it's still legal, and the latter state has been prospering from the extraction of the natural resource.