Hi @pgruetter , 

Organization administrators, repository administrators, and users with the Maintain role can always push to a protected branch. 

If you are repository administrators , you could use your personal access token to push changes.  You could store it in secrets. Please remember adding persist-credentials: false to checkout@v2.  

There is my workflow yml example for push with PAT: 

jobs:
  job1:
    name: push
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
  with:
    persist-credentials: false
- name: Create local changes
  run: |
   touch $(hexdump -n 16 -v -e '/1 "%02X"' -e '/16 "\n"' /dev/urandom).yml
   git add --all
  working-directory: data/comments/3DACF59A72960405D3B93DF91EE3C060
- name: Commit files
  run: |
    git config --local user.email "action@github.com"
    git config --local user.name "GitHub Action"
    git commit -m "Add changes " -a

- name: Push changes
  uses: ad-m/github-push-action@master
  with:
    github_token: ${{ secrets.ADDTAG_PAT }}
    #github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}