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House squatting is a strange problem in the US

Suppose you own a second house or apartment which you aren't currently using (as you live somewhere else, or you are actually eg. a company or a bank or the like which can own homes), and one day you find out that someone has broken into it and just living there without permission. This is called "squatting": Living in a house or domicile without legal permission to do so, ie. permanent trespassing on someone else's property.

(Sometimes this can be someone who was living there legally, eg. paying rent, but whose contract expired for example because rent has not been paid in months, or other reasons. Othertimes it's just people who saw an unoccupied home and broke in.)

In a normal country you naturally call the police and they remove the criminals from the home and arrest them for trespassing and other crimes related to this incident.

Apparently not so in the United States (or at least some states of it).

There appears to be a very strange legal and law enforcement situation in that country which sometimes can make it surprisingly and egregiously difficult to have law enforcement, courts, or anybody, remove illegal squatters. There are even cases (as reported by some news channels) of some squatter living in a house without permission for literally years, and the bank that owns the house trying to have him removed without success, because law enforcement and courts refuse to do anything about it.

And in this example it was a bank! One would think that of all possible people and institutions banks would have the funds and army of lawyers required to have illegal squatters removed from their property immediately. But apparently not.

If a megarich and powerful institution like a bank is powerless to have illegal trespassers removed from their property, what can private citizens who own several homes do about it? Significantly less.

This also seems to be a curious situation where the actual property owners can take matters into their own hands, when the police refuse to do anything, and just go into their own property, perhaps armed with firearms, and just throw all the squatters' junk to the street and, if the squatters themselves are there, kick them out at gunpoint (or if they arrive later, stop them from entering likewise at gunpoint). And, in general, it's not illegal to do so because in most of the US homeowners can defend their property using firearms.

It's a strange situation where anarchist Wild West rules seem to apply, as law enforcement will often do very little to help.

It's rather incomprehensible. In any normal sane country such illegal trespassers would be removed from the property probably within the hour.

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