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Hotels across the country house ICE agents who conduct violent raids, detention operations and street kidnappings.
Of course people withdraw. Activists have been calling for boycotts of hotel chains like Marriott and Hilton working with ICE, arguing that companies should not materially support an enforcement regime based on mass detention, deportation and brutality.
The government seems offended that anyone would even object. When a Hilton-branded hotel reportedly refused to house ICE agents, the government’s response became unhinged. with the Department of Homeland Security shouting on social media that it was “unacceptable.”
As if private companies are obliged to support armed state violence. As if saying no to ICE is somehow unreasonable or even treasonous.
It’s easy to dismiss the response as ideological, performative, or simply an episode of internet outrage. But beneath that lies a much older and much more serious question—one that sounds stuffy until you think about how modern law enforcement actually works: What are the limits to the government’s ability to put private space at the service of coercive state power?
That question is at the heart of the Third Amendment – the amendment that most people have forgotten if they ever knew what it was.
Dusting off the Third Amendment
The Third Amendment prohibits the government from forcing people to house soldiers in their homes without permission during peacetime.
The Founders responded to very specific British abuses in the decades leading up to the American Revolution. The British Parliament Billeting operations required colonists to house troops and provide them with supplies, including specifically “diet, and small ale, cyder [sic]or rum mixed with water.”
The 1765 Quartering Act prevented British troops from being housed in private homes, but that was required colonial legislature places for soldiers to stayincluding barracks, inns and alehouses – basically the Marriotts of the day. Later, in 1774, Parliament has again issued a quarter law that requires private homes to house British soldiers and allowed royal governors – the Crown’s appointed executive officers in the new colonies – to find places to house British soldiers in ‘uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns or other buildings’.
And, This is reported by the National Constitution Centera non-partisan constitutional education organization, there were reports of the British military entering private homes during the French and Indian War.
The colonists hated it, of course. They were very suspicious of standing armies that operated among civilians and depended on civilians for housing, supplies and logistics: George Washington, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton everyone was vociferously against it. Standing armies were invasive, expensive and coercive. They hated it so much that they included it as a complaint in the Declaration of Independence – and then enshrined their objection in the Bill of Rights.
The Third Amendment reflects a simple principle: government may not usurp private space for enforcement just because it is convenient. (The fact that the newly formed United States promptly ignored this principle when it came to the Indians is very relevant hypocrisy.)
It’s easy to dismiss the Third Amendment as irrelevant today: No one is cramming ICE agents into your mother’s guest room and demanding she serve them weak mojitos—yet.
This particular amendment has never been the basis for a Supreme Court ruling, and modern lower courts have dismissed it as inapplicable to modern policing. (A federal court ruled in 2015 Mitchell v. City of Henderson ruled that Third Amendment protections did not apply because local police officers are not soldiers.)
But that dismissal depends on pretending that modern law enforcement bears no resemblance to a standing domestic army — a pretext that is harder to maintain given the ongoing events in Minnesota.
ICE is a paramilitary force, period
ICE is formally a civilian – not military – agency with a law enforcement component charged with enforcing immigration laws. In reality it operates as a paramilitary force. Agents conduct coordinated raids, deploy tactical units, carry military style weaponsand working with local police forces that have themselves been heavily militarized in recent decades.
These are not malicious actions: they are protocols. The Trump administration has framed this work not as immigration or law enforcement, but as a fight against “invasion,” “criminal aliens,” And “alien enemies“–and ICE agents behave accordingly.
In Minnesota, this attitude has led to extraordinary violence. The ICE agent who killed Renee Good earlier this month was immediately shielded from public accountability as the government smeared her and her wife to justify the killing.
A 21 years old said he was blind in one eye after officers fired a projectile into his face at close range. That same week, officers threw flash grenades into a car containing six childrenincluding a six-month-old baby who reportedly stopped breathing and had to be revived by his mother, who performed CPR.
So if ICE agents operating in this manner require “billing,” the relevant question is not whether they technically qualify as “soldiers.” At issue is whether the function they perform – as armed agents of the state deployed against the civilian population – raises the same constitutional concerns that the Third Amendment was designed to prevent.
Hotels can say no
Housing ICE agents is not a neutral act. It is part of the logistical backbone of Trump’s detention and deportation machine. ICE does not operate in isolation; To operate at scale, it relies on an extensive network of private contractors, detention centers, transportation providers and shelters.
Hotels provide a gathering place, proximity, rest and supplies for officers conducting raids and directing people to detention centers. Accommodation is infrastructure. And when that infrastructure is treated as something that citizens or private companies must automatically provide, the consent that the Third Amendment requires has already been abandoned.
That brings us to the Hilton mess.
When Hilton stripped a local hotel of its franchise after reports that the property refused to house ICE agents in early January, individuals reportedly started canceling Hilton Honors accounts in protest. It sent a clear message: refusing to provide private space for armed federal agents is no longer seen as a neutral business choice — it’s a provocation.
This wording reflects the government’s response.
The Department of Homeland Security melted on social media He accuses Hilton of siding with “murderers and rapists” and deliberately undermining federal law enforcement.
Except for the fact that most people held by DHS are not murderers and rapists. According to the newspaper, 73 percent do not even have a criminal conviction. TRAC Immigration database – in what world is a private company required to cooperate with law enforcement officers by harboring them?
That is precisely the dynamic that the Third Amendment was designed to reject.
Private actors are not obligated to materially support state violence. Hotels are privately owned businesses. They can decide for themselves who they accommodate and under what conditions. Refusing to accommodate ICE is not sabotage or resistance – not really. It is the ordinary exercise of property and contract rights in the face of an increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement apparatus.
The reason the Third Amendment feels outdated is because we have normalized everything it warned about: heavily armed officers operating within communities, private space dedicated to enforcement, and government officials acting offended when someone refuses.
It’s also impossible to ignore how selective this alarm has been. Law enforcement operating aggressively within Black and brown communities has been normalized for decades: raids, checkpoints, and militarized policing are treated as background noise rather than a constitutional crisis. This reality has rarely raised serious concerns about standing armies or forced cooperation.
But when those same tactics show up in places like Minnesota, where the people affected are likely to be white– with the visibility and connections to power this can bring – the discomfort suddenly increases.
What has changed is not the behavior. It’s who is being subjected to it – and who is now being asked to quietly accommodate it.
The Third Amendment was not written for a world in which federal agents routinely move through civilian communities, assaulting and brutalizing them, supported by infrastructure that private actors cannot refuse to provide.
What we are seeing now is not the law being enforced, but another constitutional boundary being eroded through normalization – first in black and brown communities, and now everywhere else. Hotels are no more obliged to help with this than private citizens.
And the government need not be offended if hotels – and the constitution – say no.
#Opinion #Hotels #constitutional #house #ICE #agents