A million—or at least 30—years ago, I would go every Friday morning with a group of Notre Dame students to the local abortion "clinic" in South Bend to protest the killing of innocent babies. Our protest was simple: for one hour we would pray the entire Holy Rosary and the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. Then we would leave and go back to school.

So with a couple of deaths in as many weeks in Minnesota during the anti-ICE protests, it especially bothers me that people who want to express their opinions via free assembly wind up dead. There is, of course, enough blame to go around on all sides here; but there's also a real lack of common sense on the part of the protestors that we had learned as student protestors at that abortion mill.

First: a healthy respect for the police. There was always at least one policeman present on those Friday mornings, and he would, in no uncertain terms, lay down the law, literally, about how we were to conduct ourselves if we didn't want to wind up in the back of his squad car.

The main thing was that we had to keep moving: no blocking the doctor's—make that "doktor" since this man had more in common with Mengele than St. Anthony Maria Zaccaria—driveway. We didn't have to run or jog or anything of that sort; we just could not stand still. We were to keep to our beads and process back and forth. Simple.

Second, we were not to engage anyone: not the people entering the abortion clinic—many of whom looked eerily similar to our classmates at Notre Dame—nor the pro-abortion protestors on the other side of the street. No throwing leaflets, no proselytizing—otherwise we were going to cool off in the police car. And I don't think it ever occurred to us to antagonize the police, who, in fairness, were only there to maintain order.

Finally, we could not do anything about those abortion-loving protestors who would cross the street and get into our faces with their cameras, snapping pictures of us whether we liked it or not. I did not like that, and I think I crushed one or more rosary beads while shuffling back and forth with my confreres and the locals, of which there were many, while these all-but-belligerent "cameramen" repeatedly took my picture. Mercifully, one of the policemen was unabashedly pro-life and was definitely on our side; so whenever someone from the other side would cross over with their cameras, he'd put them back in their place.