The FBI is asking agents across the U.S. to travel to Minneapolis for temporary duty, according to people familiar with the situation.

The bureau in recent days sent messages to agents nationwide seeking volunteers to temporarily transfer to the city, the people said. The messages didn’t specifically reference the anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests that have escalated in Minneapolis and didn’t detail the assignment, the people said.

The Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security have already been increasing their presence in Minneapolis. The city has become a focal point of anti-ICE protests since an officer shot and killed a woman, Renee Good, on Jan. 7 while she was in her car.

It wasn’t immediately clear what the FBI would ask agents who volunteered to travel to Minneapolis to do. FBI agents have traditionally focused on national security-related tasks such as counter-terrorism, organized crime and high-profile violent offences.

FBI Director Kash Patel and U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on Friday visited Minneapolis, according to a post shared on Patel’s X account. Patel said in the post that the FBI was “cracking down on violent rioters and investigating the funding networks supporting the criminal actors with multiple arrests already.”

The FBI declined to comment.

Immigration has traditionally not been a core FBI mission. Roughly one-quarter of agents within the bureau were assigned to work on immigration-related duties, according to data that Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, shared with media outlets in October.

President Donald Trump has also threatened to send military forces to quell demonstrations. The Pentagon has ordered about 1,500 active-duty troops to prepare for possible deployment to Minnesota in the event that violence escalates there, The Washington Post reported, citing defence officials it didn’t identify.

The soldiers are assigned to two infantry battalions with the Army’s 11th Airborne Division, which is based in Alaska and specializes in cold-weather operations, according to the officials, who called the move “prudent planning.” It’s not clear whether any of them will be sent to the state, according to the report.

The White House told the newspaper that it’s typical for the Pentagon “to be prepared for any decision the President may or may not make,” while Defence Department press officers didn’t respond to requests for comment, it said.

A federal judge on Friday ordered immigration officers not to arrest, detain, pepper-spray or otherwise retaliate against peaceful protesters in Minneapolis after demonstrators alleged their constitutional rights were being violated.

The Department of Homeland Security “is taking appropriate and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers and the public from dangerous rioters,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the agency, said in a statement to Bloomberg in response to the ruling.

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