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 raided a congressional meeting for the Republic of Texas held in Bryan, Texas.

More than 20 police and agents prevented the members from leaving, seized their cellphones, recording equipment, computers and fingerprinted them.

The raid was in response to to legal summons sent by Republic of Texas members to a Kerr County judge and bank employee. The organization demanded the judge and bank employee appear before Republic of Texas court held at the Veterans and Foreign Wars building in Bryan on the day the police raided the meeting.

State and federal officials say the chief justice of the international Common Law Court for the Republic of Texas had issued writs of quo warranto, mandamus and a subpoena not recognized by county, state and federal governments.

“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,” Kerr County sheriff Rusty Hierholzer told the Houston Chronicle.

The group believes the state of Texas was illegally annexed by the federal government and Texas remains an independent nation under occupation.

Police told the newspaper they did not want a repeat of a 1997 week-long standoff between the group and police.

The Republic of Texas group cites public opinion polls that show significant support for the secession of Texas and other states from the federal Union.

A poll conducted last September during the Scottish independence vote shows one in four Americans are in favor of seceding from the United States.

Former Congressman Ron Paul believes secession is already underway in the United States.

“I would like to start off by talking about the subject and the subject is secession and nullification, the breaking up of government, and the good news is it’s going to happen. It’s happening,” Paul said last month during a speech at the Mises Institute.

“And it’s not going to be because there will be enough people in the U.S. Congress to legislate it. It won’t happen. It will be defacto. You know, you’ll have a gold standard when the paper standard fails and we’re getting awfully close to that. And people will have to resort to taking care of themselves. So when conditions breakdown, there’s going to be an alternative. And I think that’s what we’re witnessing.”

Last week Infowars.com reported on a Department of Homeland Security intelligence assessment issued earlier this month that characterizes sovereign citizen groups as an equal if not worse threat to the government than ISIS.

According to CNN the “government says these are extremists who believe that they can ignore laws and that their individual rights are under attack in routine daily instances such as a traffic stop or being required to obey a court order.”

The assessment states that “law enforcement officers will remain the primary target of (sovereign citizen) violence over the next year due to their role in physically enforcing laws and regulations.”

In 2014 National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a University of Maryland project funded by the Department of Homeland Security, designated the so-called sovereign citizen movement as the number one domestic terrorist threat in America.

In August, Infowars.com reported:

Sovereign citizens do not constitute a cohesive movement, although the government characterizes them as such. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates around 100,000 Americans were “hard-core sovereign believers” in 2010 and an additional 200,000 were “just starting out by testing sovereign techniques for resisting everything from speeding tickets to drug charges.”

The SPLC works with the DHS to formulate the terrorist threat posed by citizens allegedly belonging to the sovereign citizen movement.

According to a report by issued by START last month, “sovereign citizens were the top concern of law sovereign enforcement” and ranked ahead of neo-Nazis, the KKK, the patriot movement, and other “idiosyncratic sectarians,” including survivalists, all who allegedly pose a threat to the police and the state according to a survey conducted by the Homeland Security funded organization.

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