Hotels Have a Constitutional Right Not To House ICE Agents

Hotels across the country are housing ICE agents as they carry out violent raids, detention operations, and street abductions.

Of course people are pushing back. Activists have been calling for boycotts 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, with the Department of Homeland Security yelling on social media that it was “unacceptable.”

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.

Dusting off the Third Amendment

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’s Quartering Acts required colonists to house troops and provide them with supplies, including, specifically “with diet, and small beer, cyder [sic], or rum mixed with water.”

The 1765 Quartering Act prevented British troops from being housed in private homes, but it also required colonial legislatures to provide quarters for soldiers to be lodged in, including barracks, inns, and ale houses—basically the Marriotts of the day. Later, in 1774, Parliament enacted another quartering act that required private homes to quarter British soldiers 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.”

And, according to the National Constitution Center, 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: George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton 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 ignored this principle when it came to Native Americans is deeply relevant hypocrisy.)

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 in Mitchell v. City of Henderson ruled that Third Amendment protections didn’t apply because local police officers are not soldiers.)

But 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 a paramilitary force, full stop

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, carry military-style weapons, and work hand-in-hand with local police departments that have themselves been heavily militarized over the last several decades.

These aren’t rogue actions: They’re protocol. The Trump administration has framed this work not as immigration or law enforcement, but as combat—against “invasion,” “criminal aliens,” and “alien enemies“—and ICE agents are behaving accordingly.

In Minnesota, that posture has resulted in extraordinary violence. The ICE agent who killed Renee Good earlier this month was immediately shielded from public accountability while the administration smeared her and her wife to justify the killing.

A 21-year-old said he was left blinded in one eye after agents fired a projectile into his face at close range. That same week, agents threw flash-bang grenades into a car carrying six children, including a six-month-old baby who reportedly stopped breathing and had to be revived by his mother, who performed CPR.

So 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.

Hotels can say no

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.

Which brings us to the Hilton mess.

When Hilton stripped a local hotel of its franchise following reports that the property declined to host ICE agents in early January, individuals reportedly began canceling 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.

That framing mirrors the government’s response.

The Department of Homeland Security melted down on social media accusing Hilton of siding with “murderers and rapists” and deliberately undermining federal law enforcement.

Setting aside that most of the people DHS is detaining aren’t murderers and rapists—indeed, 73 percent have no criminal conviction, according to the TRAC Immigration database—in what world is a private business required to cooperate with law enforcement by housing them?

That is precisely the dynamic the Third Amendment was written to reject.

Private 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.

It’s also impossible to ignore how selective this alarm has been. Law enforcement operating aggressively inside Black and brown communities has been normalized for decades—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 be white—with the visibility and connections to power that can bring—the discomfort suddenly sharpens.

What’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.

And the government doesn’t get to act offended when hotels—and the Constitution—tell it no.

Opinion: Hotels Have a Constitutional Right Not To House ICE Agents was originally published by Rewire News Group and is republished with permission.