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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. 

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........

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