The United States is slowly turning into a 'police state' and people are being controlled more and more by police state apparatus, an American peace activist says. "We have to go through full body X-ray machines to get on flights," Cindy Sheehan told Press TV's US desk on Monday. On Tuesday morning, over a dozen SWAT -- Special Weapons and Tactics -- officers broke into a house in California and detained a man, handcuffed him, put him and his three children, aged 3, 7 and 11, in a cruiser and commenced to search his house, she said. The man was questioned for hours, all because of his ex-wife's overdue student loans. Sheehan described the incident as “oppressive.” "Of course we have seen such [incidents]. When we had a demo at the G-20, the last one was in Pittsburg, and there were more heavily armed police officers… I myself was there. I got tear gassed, I got shot at with rubber bullets, chased by the police just for exercising our freedom of speech!" "The most damning thing that shows that the United States is in the process of [a] police state is the recent passage of the USA Patriot Act which basically makes the Constitution of the United States null and void," said Sheehan. A SWAT team is an elite tactical unit in various national law enforcement departments. They are trained to perform high-risk operations that fall outside of the abilities of regular officers. The first SWAT team in the US was established in the Los Angeles Police Department in 1968. Show Less >>