Headline and lead into an article in American Spectator is as follows:
Liberals Want Americans to House Illegal Immigrants: Is Your Home Next?
The Office of Global Michigan is encouraging “everyday Americans” to volunteer to house illegal immigrants and “make a difference by welcoming refugees from around the world.” “Volunteers [are] needed” to “support refugee resettlement efforts in Michigan,” says the office’s website,…
Last week the Governor of Massachusetts suggested the same thing along with a local elected official saying: “It is a shared responsibility.”
My response to these attitudes is, they instituted their sanctuary policies; therefore, they can house illegal aliens. Surely the governor’s mansion, in those areas, have sufficient space to house a significant number. Other elected officials, who support these policies, can house some. Maybe their Capital building has a large open area. They house some there.
I know you are wondering what does all this have to do with the Constitutional Third Amendment. What happens when governments decide to turn this request into a demand and start forcibly housing illegal aliens in private homes? The answer may be the Third Amendment. Yes, the wording is about soldiers; however, the relevant word may be “quartered”. The government would be forcibly quartering people, who have violated our laws, in citizens private homes. NYC forcibly removed tenants from an apartment building to house illegals. In some European countries, people have been moved out of their homes to make way for illegal alien. It is not as far fetched as it may seem.
Following is information on the least thought about amendment. At some point, it could become relevant.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
Third Amendment to the United States Constitution
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
The Third Amendment (Amendment III) to the United States Constitution places restrictions on the quartering (the placement and/or sheltering) of soldiers in private homes without the owner’s consent, forbidding the practice in peacetime. The amendment is a response to the Quartering Acts passed by the Parliament of Great Britain during the buildup to the American Revolutionary War, which had allowed the British Army to lodge soldiers in public buildings.
The Third Amendment was introduced in Congress in 1789 by James Madison as a part of the United States Bill of Rights, in response to Anti-Federalist objections to the new Constitution. Congress proposed the amendment to the states on September 28, 1789, and by December 15, 1791, the necessary three-quarters of the states had ratified it. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson announced the adoption of the amendment on March 1, 1792.
The amendment is one of the least controversial of the Constitution and is rarely litigated, with criminal justice writer Radley Balko calling it the “runt piglet” of the U.S. Constitution.[1] To date, it has never been the primary basis of a Supreme Court decision,[2][3][4] though it was the basis of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit case Engblom v. Carey in 1982.
Judicial interpretation
The Third Amendment is among the least cited sections of the U.S. Constitution.[15] In the words of Encyclopædia Britannica, “as the history of the country progressed with little conflict on American soil, the amendment has had little occasion to be invoked.”[16] To date, no major Supreme Court decision has used the amendment as its primary basis.[3][4]
The legal historian Tom W. Bell argued in 1993 that the quartering of American soldiers during the War of 1812 and American Civil War violated the Third Amendment, but this argument was never presented in court during either war. Following the Civil War, the Army compensated property owners for rent and damages, which may have preempted Third Amendment claims.[17]
The Third Amendment has been invoked in a few instances as helping establish an implicit right to privacy in the Constitution.[18] Justice William O. Douglas used the amendment along with others in the Bill of Rights as a partial basis for the majority decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965),[19] which cited the Third Amendment as implying a belief that an individual’s home should be free from agents of the state.[18]
In one of the seven opinions in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), Justice Robert H. Jackson cited the Third Amendment as providing evidence of the Framers’ intent to constrain executive power even during wartime:[18]
[t]hat military powers of the Commander in Chief were not to supersede representative government of internal affairs seems obvious from the Constitution and from elementary American history. Time out of mind, and even now in many parts of the world, a military commander can seize private housing to shelter his troops. Not so, however, in the United States, for the Third Amendment says … [E]ven in war time, his seizure of needed military housing must be authorized by Congress.[20]
One of the few times a federal court was asked to invalidate a law or action on Third Amendment grounds was in Engblom v. Carey (1982).[21] In 1979, prison officials in New York organized a strike; they were evicted from their prison facility residences, which were reassigned to members of the National Guard who had temporarily taken their place as prison guards. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled: (1) that the term owner in the Third Amendment includes tenants (paralleling similar cases regarding the Fourth Amendment, governing search and seizure), (2) National Guard troops are “soldiers” for purposes of the Third Amendment, and (3) that the Third Amendment is incorporated (applies to the states) by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment.[22] The case was remanded to the district court, which dismissed it on the grounds that state officials could not have been aware of this interpretation.[23]
In the most recent Third Amendment decision handed down by a federal court, on February 2, 2015, the United States District Court for the District of Nevada held in Mitchell v. City of Henderson that the Third Amendment does not apply to intrusions by municipal police officers as they are not soldiers.[24] For his claims under the Third Amendment, Mitchell had alleged that the police used his house as a lookout point.[25]
In an earlier case, United States v. Valenzuela (1951),[26] the defendant asked that a federal rent-control law be struck down because it was “the incubator and hatchery of swarms of bureaucrats to be quartered as storm troopers upon the people in violation of Amendment III of the United States Constitution.”[27] The court declined his request. Later, in Jones v. United States Secretary of Defense (1972),[28] Army reservists unsuccessfully cited the Third Amendment as justification for refusing to march in a parade. Similar arguments in a variety of contexts have been denied in other cases.[29]
My reasoning for potential usage of the Third Amendment is the case of Griswold v Connecticut where Justice Douglas held home “should be free of agents of the state”. If governments began forcibly housing illegal immigrants in private homes, it could be the foundation for legal action.
