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People gather for a noise protest outside a hotel where they believe Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are staying in Bloomington, Minnesota, on January 16, 2026.of hotel chains like Marriott and Hilton that cooperate with ICE, arguing that businesses should not be providing material support for an enforcement regime built on mass detention, deportation, and brutality.
The government seems offended that anyone would even object. When one Hilton-branded hotel reportedly refused to host ICE agents, the backlash from the government was unhinged,As if private businesses are obligated to support armed state violence. As if saying no to ICE is somehow unreasonable or even traitorous. It’s easy to dismiss the backlash as ideological, performative, or just another episode of internet outrage. But underneath it is a much older and much more serious question — one that sounds dusty until you think about how modern law enforcement actually works: What are the limits on the government’s ability to force private space into service for coercive state power?That question sits at the heart of the Third Amendment — the one most people have forgotten about if they ever knew what it was at all.The Third Amendment prohibits the government from forcing people to “quarter,” or house, soldiers in their homes during peacetime without consent. The Founders were responding to very specific British abuses in the decades leading up to the American Revolution. The British Parliament’srequired colonists to house troops and provide them with supplies, including, specifically “with diet, and small beer, cyder , or rum mixed with water.”and allowed royal governors — the Crown’s appointed executive officials in the new colonies — to find places to house British soldiers in “uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns, or other buildings.”, a nonpartisan organization for constitutional education, there were reports of the British military forcing their way into private homes during the French and Indian War. The colonists hated it, of course. They were deeply suspicious of standing armies operating among civilians and relying on civilians for housing, supplies, and logistics:all loudly opposed it. Standing armies were invasive, expensive, and coercive. They hated it so much that they listed it as a grievance in the Declaration of Independence — and then enshrined their objection in the Bill of Rights. The Third Amendment reflects a simple principle: The government does not get to commandeer private space for enforcement just because it’s convenient. (The fact that the newly formed United States promptly It’s easy to dismiss the Third Amendment as irrelevant today: No one is stuffing ICE agents into your mom’s spare bedroom and demanding that she serve them weak mojitos — yet. This particular amendment has never been the basis of a Supreme Court decision, and modern lower courts have waved it away as inapplicable to modern policing. (As recently as 2015, a federal court inBut that dismissal depends upon pretending that modern law enforcement bears no resemblance to a standing domestic army — a pretense that gets harder to maintain given the ongoing events in Minnesota.ICE is formally a civilian — not military — agency with a law enforcement component tasked with enforcing immigration laws. In reality, it operates as a paramilitary force. Agents conduct coordinated raids, deploy tactical units, carryThese aren’t rogue actions: They’re protocol. The Trump administration has framed this work not as immigration or law enforcement, but as combat — against “earlier this month was immediately shielded from public accountability while the administration smeared her and her wife to justify the killing.said he was left blinded in one eye after agents fired a projectile into his face at close range. That same week, agentsSo when ICE agents operating this way need “quartering,” the relevant question is not whether they technically qualify as “soldiers.” It’s whether the function they serve — as armed agents of the state deployed against civilian populations — triggers the same constitutional concerns the Third Amendment was designed to prevent.Housing ICE agents is not a neutral act. It is part of the logistical spine of Trump’s detention-and-deportation machine. ICE does not operate in isolation; it relies on a vast network of private contractors, detention centers, transportation providers, and lodging to function at scale. Hotels provide staging ground, proximity, and rest and resupply for agents conducting raids that funnel people into detention facilities. Lodging is infrastructure. And when that infrastructure is treated as something civilians or private businesses are expected to provide automatically, the consent that the Third Amendment requires has already been abandoned. When Hilton stripped a local hotel of its franchise following reports that the property declined to host ICE agents in early January, individualscanceling Hilton Honors accounts in protest. It sent a clear message: Declining to provide private space for armed federal agents is no longer treated as a neutral business choice — it’s a provocation.Setting aside that most of the people DHS is detaining aren’t murderers and rapists — indeed, 73 percent have no criminal conviction, according to thePrivate actors are not obligated to materially support state violence. Hotels are private businesses. They get to decide who they lodge and under what conditions. Declining to house ICE isn’t sabotage or resistance — not really. It’s 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’ve normalized everything it warned against: heavily armed agents operating inside communities, private space pressed into service for enforcement, and government officials acting offended when anyone refuses.— raids, checkpoints, militarized policing treated as background noise rather than the constitutional crisis it is. That reality has rarely triggered serious concern about standing armies or coerced cooperation. But when those same tactics show up in places like Minnesota, where the people affected are more likely to beWhat’s changed isn’t the conduct. 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 battering and brutalizing them, supported by infrastructure that private actors are not permitted to refuse to provide. What we are seeing now is not the law being enforced, but yet another constitutional boundary being worn down through normalization — first in Black and brown communities, and now everywhere else. Hotels are not required to help that happen any more than private citizens are.Trump is silencing political dissent. We appeal for your support. Progressive nonprofits are the latest target caught in Trump’s crosshairs. With the aim of eliminating political opposition, Trump and his sycophants are working to curb government funding, constrain private foundations, and even cut tax-exempt status from organizations he dislikes.We can only resist Trump’s attacks by cultivating a strong base of support. The right-wing mediasphere is funded comfortably by billionaire owners and venture capitalist philanthropists. At Truthout, we have you.Please take a meaningful action in the fight against authoritarianism: make a one-time or monthly donation to Truthout. If you have the means, please dig deep.This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.Truthout must raise $31,000 for our basic publishing costs this month. We are appealing to our readers to make a one-time or monthly donation.
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