Can Sovereign Citizens be deported or interned?

If a Sovereign Citizen insists that he or she is not a U.S. citizen, but rather a sovereign entity, and the courts take him or her at his or her word, can he or she be deported or interned?

I don’t see how the courts could “take them at their word” and not acknowledge their entire claim-Sample the madness here.

In order to be deported, you’ve have to have a place to deport them to. Countries are obligated to take in their own citizens, so if you deport a person who is a citizen of Mexico to Mexico, Mexico has to take them. But Mexico doesn’t have to take citizens of other countries. So we can’t deport Russians to Mexico.

So…you want to deport a sovereign citizen. Before you can do that, there has to be a country willing to take them. And good luck with that.

As for stripping them of their American citizenship, that can’t happen unless they have another citizenship, even if the person wants to lose their American citizenship. It is against public policy to allow a person to become stateless.

Where could they be expelled to that wouldn’t also have the same problem? Some sort of Heinlein-esque coventry where no law or government pertains? I’m unaware of anyplace that fits the description.

Hence the ‘or’ in the question.

Perhaps Marie Byrd Land in Antarctica, which has not been formally claimed by any sovereign nation. Just the place for rugged individualists.

Or maybe international waters, like Philip Nolan, The Man Without a Country, who was sentenced to spend his life at sea, perpetually being transferred from ship to ship.

This is mostly a joke, of course. There would of course be legal and practical problems with either course.

Strictly speaking … it’s not a crime to say that we’re Sovereign Citizens … however, the OP specifies that we’re in a court of law so if we assume there’s been a violation of the law … and the law allows those convicted to be interned … then of course the court can “take their word for it” and promptly throw the individual in prison …

We’re entitled to scream “tyranny” … but we still have to pay taxes …

Ex falsum quodlibet, or Anything You Want

Or, in less Elizabethan verbiage, once you accept the idea of a sovereign citizen into your legal system, your system explodes. Any corporation worth its salt would take advantage of it, creating a flurry, nay, a blizzard of sovereign entities with no obligation to not crash through your walls in the pursuit of pizza delivery. It would be like introducing any other nonsensical premise into a supposedly self-consistent system: It would, virus-like, alter all of the underlying assumptions, infecting the meanings until the center collapsed under the weight of every term becoming nonsensical.

Because it is nonsense. It proposes no coherent system to replace any of this with. The supposed philosophy is smoke and mirrors bafflegab meant to, first, fool the rubes who buy kits from gurus and, second, give the rubes something to say to authority figures while they lose everything due to the underlying problems which made them buy a kit in the first place.

I once dealt with a pro se sovereign citizen litigant – her brief was, as expected, full of citations to the Constitution and the UCC, even though it was clear she didn’t really understand the language she was quoting. Her brief also cited to case law and quoted opinions out of context. If any court does what the OP proposes and accepts the suggestion that sovereign citizenship is even a valid concept, you’re automatically going to end up with more SC nutcases at your doorstep – and now they’ll have a legit judicial authority to point to.

Agree with Derleth. The cure is far worse than the disease.

Although it does sound fun for the US to cordon off some section of current Federal land and declare it an enclave of government-free land. And then they can “deport” anyone claiming SC status directly to there in lieu of adjudicating their actual legal issue.

As a former Las Vegas resident I propose the section of Nevada formerly known as the Nevada Test Site - Wikipedia. It’s not like we’re going to use the land for any other good purpose any time soon. And it has plenty of room vs. the expected number of deportees times their life expectancy in that waterless wilderness. :smiley:

Taking them at their word is basically throwing out the rule of law.

There’s always Detroit.

Wouldn’t they just have to be executed?
No lawyer, no trial. All their Cattle bolt gunned dead in the fields… and the fields then salted.

Relevant thread from 11 years ago. I wasn’t thinking of SovCits, but the same disposition.

Short answer: No.

Guantanamo Bay?

To amplify, let’s say a disturbed individual runs into a police station and says: “I did it! I did it! I murdered my wife Sally, and stop me before I kill again!”

The police investigate and find that his wife Sally is actually a can of Del Monte green beans that was thrown into a wood chipper, with malice aforethought.

Should the justice system “take him at his word” that he murdered his “wife” and we should imprison him, even though the fact is indisputable that he committed no crime against a person?

Seems to me that pretending that the can of green beans was a person is roughly equivalent to pretending that someone born and living in this country isn’t a US person. In both cases, a ludicrously wrong assertion that totally undermines the law.

Perhaps Bir Tawil?

We interned American citizens during WWII. So we can certainly intern “Sovereign Citizens” if we don’t take them at their word can consider them to be US citizens. As for deporting them, I think we’d be stepping on dangerous ground if we did allow for such revocation of citizenship. Too easy to revoke someone’s citizenship non-voluntarily. And where would we deport them too anyway?

Here is Unca Cecil’s take on giving up US citizenship possibly with a twist of staying in the country that has some useful info.

Two issues:

  1. Could a US court “assist” an individual in properly giving up their US citizenship in some way? Not technically deported but given a helping hand to leave and then assisted with having the proper forms filled out at a US embassy.

  2. The 2nd part of the column covers an alleged way to give up US citizenship but returning to the US right away and becoming some kind of in-between citizen. Could a US court assist in some way this happening with the person’s consent? And once the person has such status would they be deportable?

Note that un-giving up US citizenship is remarkably easy (assuming you didn’t take up arms against the US or some such).

The focus of my questions being turning the phony declaration of non-citizen into the real thing.

no!! Not detroit!!