American cities and civil disobedience

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Reporting the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the U.S. cities and their behaviour has something in common with civil disobedience, dating back to Henry David Thoreau. In his 1849 essay, Resistance to Civil Government - On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, Thoreau expresses his dissent against slavery and the Mexican War, arguing that the only obligation of a citizen is to act according to what he believes to be right. He put into question the idea of relying on the choices of legislators, abdicating one's own conscience.

Civil disobedience, wrote Hannah Arendt in 1970, is a response, on the one hand, to the representative system crisis by the erosion of the institutions designed to protect citizens, and, on the other, to a self-reliant political apparatus. When Arendt wrote On Civil Disobedience, the protest movement against US intervention in Vietnam was at its peak and had merged with the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. Shortly before his assassination, he called that war the poison of the American soul.