The US justice department has said it is investigating protesters who disrupted a Sunday service at a Minnesota church because they believe a pastor there works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Video showed protesters inside the church chanting "ICE out" and "Justice for Renee Good", the woman killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis earlier this month.
Justice department officials accuse the protesters of "desecrating a house of worship", and say they will investigate them for civil rights violations.
Anti-ICE protests continue in the state against President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, and the Pentagon reportedly placed 1,500 soldiers on standby for possible deployment.
On Sunday, US Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to exercise the "full force of federal law" against the demonstrators who interrupted the service at the Cities Church in St Paul, which neighbors Minneapolis.
Later on Monday, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said on X that the justice department "will pursue federal charges in this case".
Protesters say that one of the church's eight pastors, David Easterwood, is a local ICE official.
Easterwood was not leading the service on Sunday.
A person by the same name is identified in ACLU court filings as the acting director of the ICE St Paul field office, according to reporting by the Associated Press and the Minnesota Star Tribune newspaper.
The AP also reported he appeared alongside Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem in Minneapolis at a news conference last October.
The BBC has contacted the church for comment.
In a statement, DHS said it does not confirm or deny the identities of its agents as "publicizing their identities puts their lives and the lives of their families at serious risk".
Monique Cullars-Doty, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota and one of the protest organisers, told CBS News, the BBC's US partner, that "we can't sit back idly and watch people go and be led astray".
Elsewhere in the city, protests with occasional clashes have persisted at the Whipple building in Minneapolis where federal agents are headquartered.
A DHS spokesperson said on Monday that at least 3,000 people have been arrested in Minneapolis since the deployments.
On Friday, a US federal judge issued an order limiting the crowd control tactics that can be used by ICE agents toward peaceful protesters in Minneapolis.
Thousands of ICE agents are in Minnesota as part of a surge by the Trump administration after his election pledge for the biggest deportation operation of undocumented migrants in history.
On Sunday, CBS News reported that 1,500 active-duty soldiers have been placed on standby for possible deployment to Minneapolis, after President Trump said he may invoke the Insurrection Act to respond to protests.
The 19th-Century law allows the president to use active-duty military personnel to perform law-enforcement duties inside the US.
It was last invoked in 1992 when massive riots broke out in Los Angeles over the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a black man.
