Red House eviction defense

The Red House eviction defense was an occupation protest at a foreclosed house on North Mississippi Avenue in the Humboldt neighborhood in the Albina district, a historically Black district of Portland, Oregon, United States.

The Kinneys, a Black and Indigenous family, owned the house, often called the "Red House," for 65 years. They took out a mortgage on the house in the early 2000s, but the loan went into default in 2016. In 2018 the family lost the home in a non-judicial foreclosure proceeding, but continued to live there. William Kinney III (also known as William X. Nietzche) used sovereign citizen ideas to argue that the law does not have jurisdiction over the family and their debts.

In September 2020, Multnomah County Sheriff's Deputies served a court order at the home and evicted the Kinneys. Activists rose in support of the family and occupied the property and the surrounding area.

In December 2020, law enforcement officers returned, removing some activists and arresting several people. Activists then barricaded the area surrounding the house. Police and demonstrators clashed as police tried to clear demonstrators from the area.

On December 11, the Kinney family and city officials reached an agreement, barricades were removed, and reports circulated that the developer might return the house to the Kinneys at cost. However, upon receiving the funds from the crowd funding, the family stated they would weigh their options when deciding whether or not to repurchase the house.^{[citation needed]}

Pauline and William Kinney sold the Red House to William Kinney, Jr. and his wife, who is Upper Skagit, in 1995. In the early 2000s, the younger Kinney family mortgaged their home, which had by that time been in their family for 65 years, in order to pay legal fees after their son William Kinney III (William X. Nietzche), then age 17, was found guilty of killing a man and injuring his wife in 2002 while without a valid driver's license. The mortgage was from Freedom Mortgage Corporation in May 2002. In March 2004, they refinanced that loan with Beneficial Oregon Incorporated.

In December 2016 the loan was transferred to another company. According to a website created by supporters of the Kinney family, the family began receiving bills from both the previous mortgage company and the new one, and so began putting payments into an escrow account instead of paying the bills so the billing issue could be resolved. However, according to reports by The Oregonian, "it’s not clear if that account was ever set up," and the Kinney family missed 17 payments for over a year. Multiple communications were made between the Kinney family and lenders during this period which questioned the lenders' jurisdiction, with rhetoric "consistent with the so-called sovereign citizen movement". The Kinneys would mark forms "void" and return them, and claimed that "the company had no jurisdiction".

William Kinney III and his mother have stated in court filings and on social media that the law and the courts do not have jurisdiction over them. J.J. MacNab, a research fellow at the George Washington University's Program on Extremism, said that their rhetoric was similar to that of Ammon Bundy in his occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and that they appeared to be adherents of Moorish sovereign citizen ideas. The Kinneys' social media posts have also referred to QAnon and other right-wing conspiracy theories.