In re the Marriage of: Amber Otte McMillan v. Abram Lennox Eli McMillan

This opinion is nonprecedential except as provided by
Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 136.01, subd. 1(c).

STATE OF MINNESOTA
IN COURT OF APPEALS
A23-1750

In re the Marriage of:

Amber Otte McMillan, petitioner,
Respondent,

vs.

Abram Lennox Eli McMillan,
Appellant.

Filed September 16, 2024
Affirmed
Ross, Judge

Carver County District Court
File No. 10-FA-22-3

Amber Otte McMillan, Chanhassen, Minnesota (self-represented respondent)

Abram Lennox Eli McMillan, Nevada, Iowa (self-represented appellant)

Considered and decided by Ross, Presiding Judge; Ede, Judge; and Schmidt, Judge.
NONPRECEDENTIAL OPINION
ROSS, Judge
Abram McMillan appeals from the district court’s judgment and decree dissolving
the parties’ marriage and determining child custody. He argues that the district court should
have both taken judicial notice of the fact that he and the parties’ children are “nationals
but not citizens of the United States” based on affidavits he submitted and declined to
exercise jurisdiction because of the assortment of caselaw holdings, regulations, statutes,
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and maxims he presented. We conclude that his cited authority is wholly irrelevant to the
issue he presents and that his arguments consist of unintelligible assertions and constitute
baseless challenges to jurisdiction. And because he waived any personal-jurisdiction
defense by answering the dissolution petition without challenging jurisdiction, the district
court properly exercised personal jurisdiction over him and his children.
DECISION
After Amber McMillan petitioned to dissolve her marriage to Abram McMillan in
January 2022, Abram filed an answer in May 2022 without objecting to the district court’s
exercise of personal jurisdiction over him.
Four months later, Abram submitted a document captioned, “Affidavit of
Citizenship Evidence With Ex[h]ibits,” signed by himself and stating, “I . . . hereby declare
my intention to be a national . . . but not a citizen of the United States . . . .” He
simultaneously submitted two similar affidavits on behalf of the parties’ daughters. Based
on the affidavi ts, which referenced unrelated federal regulations and caselaw, Abram
challenged the district court’s exercise of jurisdiction over the proceeding and over Abram
and the children.
The district court continued to exercise jurisdiction, concluding that, by answering
the petition without objection, Abram waived any personal-jurisdiction challenge. In doing
so, the district court observed similarities between Abram’s arguments and the meritless
arguments commonly raised by so- called “sovereign citizen[s].” The district court
dissolved the marriage, awarding sole physical custody of the children to Amber, subject
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to parenting time if Abram secures permanent housing, and joint legal custody if Abram
completes parenting classes.
In this appeal from the judgment and decree, Abram challenges the district court’s
exercise of personal jurisdiction based on his claim, “My daughters and I are nationals but
not citizens of the United States.” A defendant in a civil action must raise the defense of
lack of personal jurisdiction in his responsive pleading to the petition or in a motion filed
in lieu of a responsive pleading, Minn. R. Civ. P. 12.02, and failure to do so constitutes a
waiver of the defense, Minn. R. Civ. P. 12.08 (a). Because Abram did not challenge the
district court’s exercise of personal jurisdiction in his answer, he waived the defense.
Abram argues that the district court was nevertheless required to take “judicial
notice” of the “evidence” of his (and his daughters’) alleged noncitizen status supposedly
proved by his declarative affidavits. Judicial notice allows a court to consider a matter not
in the record before that court. See In re Reissuance of an NPDES/SDS Permit to U.S. Steel
Corp., 954 N.W.2d 572, 581 n.8 (Minn. 2021). Because the affidavits Abram submitted
are part of this record, judicial notice does not apply. But even if we ignore the
inapplicability of judicial notice, Abram’s argument about judicial notice lacks merit. In a
civil case, the district court may be required to take judicial notice of a fact that “is either
. . . generally known within the territorial jurisdiction of the trial court or . . . capable of
accurate and ready determination by resort to sources whose accuracy cannot reasonably
be questioned.” Minn. R. Evid. 201(b). Because Abram’s affidavits satisfy neither
qualification, even if judicial notice applied here, the district court would have
appropriately refused to take judicial notice of them.
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We add that the affidavits, which declare Abram’s intention that he and each of his
daughters become “a national but not a citizen of the United States” (and on which he
claims not to be subject to the district court’s exercise of personal jurisdiction), are
apparently groundless. Abram borrows the language of his affidavit declaration from a
1976 joint resolution of the 94th Congress, which approved “the Covenant to Establish a
Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in Political Union with the United States
of America” as codified in 48 U.S.C. § 1801 (1976). The historical document resolved to
confer United States citizenship on every living Mariana Islander automatically upon the
ratification of the resolution by the governing body of the Islands but permitted any adult
among them to choose instead not to remain a United States citizen by swearing the
following oath in court within six months after the resolution’s effective date (which turned
out to be ten years after congress issued the resolution): “I . . . , being duly sworn, hereby
declare my intention to be a national but not a citizen of the United States.” Id. Assuming
Abram was born in the Northern Mariana Islands—a fact his affidavit does not allege—he
cannot now avail himself of the right to become a national but not a citizen of the United
States because he’s too late, as he had only six months after the resolution became effective
to submit to do so. And regarding his two minor children, again assuming they were born
in the Islands, the provision also does not apply to them because the resolution established
that those born in the Islands after the resolution’s effective date would become “citizens
of the United States at birth” but, unlike for those already living there, provided no
mechanism to later change that citizenship status by affidavit. Id.
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Equally dispositive, even if Abram could have changed his citizenship status by an
affidavit declaring himself to be a noncitizen national, that change would have no bearing
on the district court’s personal jurisdiction over him for the dissolution proceeding or the
custody determination. This is because the district court’s personal jurisdiction over Abram
did not depend on his being a United States citizen. With no citizenship requirement, the
operative statute authorizes a district court to grant a marriage dissolution as long as “one
of the parties has resided in this state . . . for not less than 180 days immediately preceding
the commencement of the proceeding” or as long as “one of the parties has been a
domiciliary of this state for not less than 180 days immediately preceding commencement
of the proceeding.” Minn. Stat. § 518.07, subd. 1 (2022). Nor would Abram’s noncitizen
status undo his prior waiver of a personal-jurisdiction defense by having failed to challenge
jurisdiction in his responsive pleading.
Abram argues too that the district court exhibited unfair bias against him by
speculating that he was proffering essentially the same sovereign-citizen argument
contesting the district court’s jurisdiction that courts have consistently discredited as
absurd. But the district court acknowledged that Abram had not expressly characterized
himself as a “sovereign citizen.” In other cases, district court judges have struggled to
decipher what might fairly be considered the bad-faith, incomprehensible cobbling
together of random constitutional, statutory, and caselaw references having no discernable
bearing on the jurisdictional proposition asserted. These have commonly come in the form
of “sovereign citizen” arguments and assertions. And the context here informs us that the
district court had merely recognized some of the common characteristics between those
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now-familiar and uniformly rejected sovereign-citizen jurisdictional claims and Abram’s
confusing jurisdictional argument. We conclude that the district court correctly rejected
Abram’s jurisdictional argument because, as a matter of procedure, Abram waived any
personal-jurisdiction defense and, as a matter of law, the argument is confusing and legally
unfounded.
We emphasize that the argument is a haphazard mix of legal concepts that Abram
did not cogently present and that we cannot logically summarize. We caution that repeating
the argument in future litigation might, therefore, trigger proceedings for sanctions under
the Minnesota General Rules of Practice. The operative rule authorizes the court to penalize
a party for engaging in frivolous litigation, and it defines a “[f]rivolous litigant” as, among
other things, “[a] person who, after a claim has been finally determined against the person,
. . . attempts to relitigate . . . any of the issues of fact or law determined or concluded by
the final determination against the same party.” Minn. R. Gen. Prac. 9.06(b). We have
considered Abram’s argument and reviewed his repetitively cited sources. None of the
maxims, idea fragments, or authority presented on appeal, including the following
examples, can possibly support a legitimate challenge to the district court’s exercise of
personal jurisdiction: Urtetiqui v. D’Arcy, 34 U.S. 692 (1835); “evidence of the fact of
delivery of . . . affidavits to the U.S. Secretary of State”; “14th Amendment citizenship”;
“a traveler’s path”; the Constitution’s Contract Clause; “plac[ement] . . . into a condition
of involuntary servitude”; United States v. Throckmorton, 98 U.S. 61 (1878); 8 U.S.C.
§ 1502; affidavits of noncitizenship; Black’s Law Dictionary 1057 (6th ed. 1990) (defining
non-resident alien); Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901); Thirteenth Amendment’s
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abolition of slavery; United States v. Valentine, 288 F. Supp. 957 (D.P.R. 1968); 8 U.S.C.
§ 1401; Minn. Stat. § 645.44, subd. 11 (2022); United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S.
649 (1898); 8 U.S.C. § 1101; Barron ex rel. Tiernan v. City of Baltimore, 32 U.S. 243
(1833).
For these reasons we affirm the district court’s order dissolving the marriage and
determining custody of the parties’ children.
Affirmed.