Anti-ICE civil disobedience is not Catholic civil disobedience

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Jan 17, 2026

Last week I published a column titled “Critics of Minnesota ICE shooting face uphill climb. Here’s why.” I take the online chatter of the critics since then to have buttressed my argument. Case in point:

And:

And:

Simcha Fisher may not be as familiar to Catholic Culture readers as she would have been a decade ago. Like other writers whom I’ve dubbed the “Catholic New Left,” Simcha’s career has taken her from orthodox publications like the National Catholic Register to heterodox ones like America Magazine, where she is now a regular columnist. In my Catholic New Left column, I described them thusly:

The Catholic New Left…[is] not on a crusade to change the Church but to disinfect it. From what, you ask? From, well, people like me….Catholic support for President Trump, is the bête noire of the Catholic New Left. It’s the one thing they all have in common. If you favor President Trump, your Catholicity is suspect in their eyes….If I were to describe the difference between the Catholic New Left and me, I would say we have a different hierarchy of values. That is, we mostly value the same things. But we disagree on which things we value more. Their idea of what trumps what is the inverse of mine.

You can see my description of the Catholic New Left—which I wrote over a year ago—play out in Simcha’s vitriolic reaction to me. I was not denying that ICE agents being undertrained and overprotected is a bad thing. I was saying that, if this is true, it is another reason why protesters should not physically impede ICE agents from doing their jobs.

But my making that seemingly obvious point left Simcha “beyond appalled that a Jew would say such a thing” (we both have Jewish backgrounds) and telling me that “as a Jew, as a Catholic, and as an American, your words shame you.” And, oh yes, as a man too. If I am not cool with protesters blocking roads with their cars and hitting federal agents with them, that means I am somehow cool with wife-beating.

This sounds crazy to me. It may sound crazy to you too, reader. It would not sound crazy to Allie Beth Stuckey, the Evangelical influencer who tried to understand the mind of Renee Good, the Minnesota protester who was shot dead by the ICE agent. From the January 16th World Radio transcript, here is World Magazine’s Nick Eicher and the Colson Center’s Maria Baer discussing Stuckey’s podcast:

Stuckey retold the Renee Good story from a sympathetic point of view—by reconstructing the moral world that Stuckey believed that Good was living in. And in that telling, Good had absorbed a steady stream of online narratives portraying immigration enforcement as a replay of history’s darkest chapter—America as 1930s Germany, ICE as kidnappers, and silence as complicity…Well now Maria, this is one of those scenarios where you perceive that you are in a moment of history and you want history to judge you well. You want to be, as they say, on the “right side of history.”

Again, Simcha may be right that ICE agents are insufficiently trained. More reason not to be belligerent toward them. Otherwise, the attitude here seems to be one of, “Yes, the protesters should get themselves killed, because they’re protesting Nazis.” Does our Catholic faith approve of this attitude? Renee Good had children. Shouldn’t living the duties of one’s state in life trump the culture of protest? It’s true that the onus is more on those in authority to be disciplined, but I don’t think Good was within her rights to do what she was doing. Certainly not once she was told to get out of the car.

Catholicism does allow for—even encourages—civil disobedience under certain circumstances. “The citizen is obliged in conscience not to follow the directives of civil authorities when they are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons, or the teachings of the Gospel” (CCC 2242). But the civil disobedience must be nonviolent. Many anti-ICE protesters have shown themselves to be quite violent. The civil disobedience must be respectful of order, correcting an injustice rather than undermining society itself. Many anti-ICE protesters are not seeking simply the humane treatment of immigrants but the abolition of ICE altogether and a return to open borders. The civil disobedience must be willing to accept the legal consequences. This is why, here in Connecticut, Indivisible CT has called on its own participants to—wait for it—“de-escalate any potential confrontations” with ICE. Does Simcha think Indivisible CT has shamed itself too?

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi won their causes because they were nonviolent. Their protesters were brutalized, yes, but the public sided with them because they were so obviously blameless. That has not been the case with anti-ICE protesters.

King and Gandhi also knew that the goal was policy change, not catharsis.