She Bought Her Dream Home. Then a 'Sovereign Citizen' Changed the Locks.

The official-looking letters started arriving soon after Shanetta Little bought the cute Tudor house on Ivy Street in Newark. Bearing a golden seal, in aureate legalistic language, the documents claimed that an obscure 18th-century treaty gave the sender rights to claim her new house as his own.

She dismissed the letters as a hoax.

And so it was with surprise that Ms. Little found herself in her yard on Ivy Street on a June afternoon as a police SWAT team negotiated with a man who had broken in, changed her locks and hung a red and green flag in its window. He claimed he was a sovereign citizen of a country that does not exist and for whom United States laws do not apply.

Ms. Little was a victim of a ploy known as paper terrorism, a favorite tactic of an extremist group that is one of the fastest
growing, according to government experts

But the strange letters declaring that Ms. Little’s home is not her own still come. They arrive on faux-consular letterhead using the name Lenapehoking of the Al Moroccan Empire at New Jersey State Republic. Lenapehoking was the land between New York City and Philadelphia that includes New Jersey and was home to the Indigenous Lenape tribe before it was colonized by European settlers. Mr. John and his group refer to themselves as Moors.

“The Moors claim to be about Black liberation and opportunity, and uplifting Black people,” Ms. Little said in an interview seated on a staircase inside her house. “But he is literally oppressing me and taking what’s mine as a Black woman.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/26/nyregion/moors-newark.html