To get the AngryBlackLady Chronicles delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for Imani’s bi-monthly newsletter here. You can catch Imani’s monthly podcast, B*tch, Listen herein Boom! Feed lawyer.
Hotels across the country house ICE agents as they conduct violent raids, detention operations and kidnappings on the streets.
Of course people are pushing back. Activists have it was calling for a boycott of hotel chains such as Marriott and Hilton that cooperate with ICE, arguing that the businesses should not provide material support for 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 host ICE agents, the government’s response was unwavering, with the Department of Homeland Security shouting on social media that it was “unacceptable”.
As if private business is obligated to support armed state violence. As if saying no to ICE is somehow unreasonable or even treasonous.
It’s easy to dismiss the backlash as ideological, performative, or just another episode of internet outrage. But underneath is a much older and much more serious question—one that sounds dusty until you consider how modern law enforcement actually works: What are the limits to government’s ability to coerce private space into the service of coercive state power?
That question is at the heart of the Third Amendment—one that most people have forgotten if they ever knew what it was at all.
Dusting off the Third Amendment
The Third Amendment prohibits the government from forcing people to “hole up” or house soldiers in their homes in peacetime without consent.
The Founders were responding to very specific British abuses in the decades leading up to the American Revolution. The British Parliament Fourth Acts required the settlers to house the troops and provide them with provisions, including, specifically, “with diet, and small beer, cyder [sic]or rum mixed with water.’
The Quartering Act of 1765 prevented British troops from being quartered in private houses, but also I oblige colonial legislatures to provide places to accommodate soldiersincluding barracks, inns and houses – basically the Marriotts of the era. Later, in 1774, Parliament enacted another quarter act which required private residences to British soldiers and allowed royal governors—the appointed executive officers of the Crown in the new colonies—to find places to house British soldiers in “uninhabited houses, cottages, barns, or other buildings.”
And, according to the National Constitution Centera non-partisan organization for constitutional education, there were reports of the British army forcibly entering private homes during the French and Indian War.
The colonists hated it, of course. They were deeply suspicious of standing armies that operated among civilians and relied on civilians for housing, supplies and logistics: George Washington, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton they all objected loudly. 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 cannot commandeer private space for enforcement just because it’s convenient. (The fact that the newly formed United States immediately ignore this principle when this came to the Native Americans is deeply relative hypocrisy.)
It’s easy to dismiss the Third Amendment as irrelevant today: No one is putting ICE agents in your mom’s spare bedroom and demanding she serve them weak mojitos—yet.
This particular amendment has never formed the basis of a Supreme Court decision, and modern lower courts have struck it down as inapplicable to modern policing. (As recently as 2015, a federal court 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 the pretense that modern law enforcement bears no resemblance to a standing domestic army — a pretense that is becoming harder to maintain given the ongoing events in Minnesota.
ICE is a paramilitary force, period
ICE is officially a civilian — not military — agency with a law enforcement division tasked with enforcing immigration laws. In fact, it functions as a paramilitary force. Agents conduct coordinated raids, deploy tactical units, transport military-style weaponsand they work hand-in-hand with local police departments that have themselves been heavily militarized in recent decades.
These are not rogue actions: They are protocol. The Trump administration has framed this project not as immigration or law enforcement, but as a battle — 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 while the administration framed her and her wife to justify the killing.
A 21 years old said he was blinded in one eye after agents fired a projectile into his face at close range. In the same week, agents threw flash grenades at a car carrying six childrenincluding a six-month-old baby who reportedly stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated by his mother, who performed CPR.
So when ICE agents operating in this way need “quarterback,” the relevant question is not whether they technically qualify as “troopers.” It is whether the function they serve—as armed agents of the state deployed against civilian populations—triggers the same constitutional concerns that the Third Amendment was designed to prevent.
Hotels can say no
Housing ICE agents is not a neutral act. They are part of the logistical backbone of Trump’s detention and deportation machine. ICE does not work in isolation. relies on a vast network of private contractors, booking centres, transport and accommodation providers to operate at scale.
Hotels provide parking, proximity, and rest and resupply for raiding agents who funnel people into detention facilities. Accommodation is infrastructure. And when that infrastructure is treated as something citizens or private businesses are automatically expected to provide, the consent required by the Third Amendment has already been abandoned.
Which brings us to Hilton’s mess.
When Hilton removed a local hotel from its franchise after reports the property refused to host ICE agents in early January, people allegedly started canceling Hilton Honors accounts in protest. It sent a clear message: Denying private space for armed federal agents is no longer viewed as a neutral business choice—it’s a challenge.
This framework reflects the government’s response.
The Department of Homeland Security melted on social media accusing Hilton of siding with “murderers and rapists” and deliberately undermining federal law enforcement.
Leaving aside that most of the people DHS detains are not murderers and rapists—indeed, 73 percent have no criminal convictions, according to Migration TRAC database—in what world is a private business required to cooperate with law enforcement by housing them?
This is precisely the dynamic the Third Amendment was written to reject.
Private actors are not obliged to materially support state violence. Hotels are private businesses. They decide who to testify and under what conditions. Refusing to house ICE is not sabotage or resistance – not really. It is the routine exercise of property and contractual rights in the face of an increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement apparatus.
The reason the Third Amendment seems outdated is because we have normalized everything it warned about: heavily armed agents operating within communities, private space being turned on for enforcement, and government officials being offended when someone refuses.
It is also impossible to ignore how selective this alarm was. Law enforcement operating aggressively within Black and Brown communities has been normalized for decades—raids, checkpoints, militarized policing treated as background noise rather than the constitutional crisis that it is. This reality has rarely raised serious concerns about standing armies or forced cooperation.
But when these same tactics occur in places like Minnesota, where the people affected are most likely to be white—with the visibility and connections to power it can bring—the discomfort is suddenly heightened.
What has changed is not the behavior. It is who is subjected to it – and who is now asked to quietly accommodate it.
The Third Amendment was not written for a world in which federal agents routinely move through civilian communities abusing and brutalizing them, supported by infrastructure that private actors cannot refuse to provide.
What we’re seeing now is not law enforcement, but yet another constitutional boundary being eroded through normalization — first in Black and Brown communities, and now everywhere else. Hotels are under no obligation to help make this happen any more than individuals are.
And the government can’t act offended when the hotels—and the Constitution—say no.
