At least seven U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees based in Vermont have been told they will be temporarily reassigned to Minnesota to help with expanding enforcement actions there, according to an employee.

The employee, who has worked at a USCIS office in Vermont for several years and is not one of the reassigned employees, spoke to VtDigger on the condition they not be named due to fear of retaliation.

The workers, who typically process applications and check for immigration fraud, have never been sent to another state and have not previously performed the enforcement work federal immigration agents are doing in Minnesota, according to the employee.

“It’s a dangerous situation” for them, the employee said, adding that the workers’ reactions range from fears about having to work in a high-risk site to being resigned about accepting the temporary reassignment.

U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., who recently received similar reports, said she is “outraged” to hear of Vermont workers being sent out of state to support U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“At a time when aggressive ICE operations in Minnesota have already led to deadly force and widespread fear in our communities, I am outraged to hear that Vermont USCIS employees are being sent to Minneapolis to play ICE enforcement roles that fall far outside of their mission or their training,” Balint wrote in a statement Saturday. “These are highly skilled public servants who came to this work to help people navigate the immigration system fairly and lawfully, not to do dangerous door-to-door enforcement.”

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security “must explain why this is happening and ensure Vermont public servants are not being put in harm’s way or being compelled to carry out work they did not sign up for,” she added.

Balint’s office has received reports from USCIS employees in Vermont about other ways in which the Trump administration has been undermining and overburdening them in the past year.

This includes holding them to performance metrics regarding the number of cases they can process, limiting by country the cases they can work on, forcing a return to overcrowded offices that in some cases involve 50 mile commutes, denying reasonable accommodations and violating their collective bargaining agreement, spokespeople from Balint’s office said.

“With the shift in mission, it has moved from demoralizing to dangerous for both applicants/legal immigrants and USCIS employees,” Catherine White, communications director at Balint’s office, said in an email.

While USCIS, ICE and Homeland Security did not address specifics, a USCIS spokesperson confirmed the agency is increasing personnel in certain areas to support ICE enforcement.

“USCIS is proud to support ICE with volunteers who have extensive expertise to help enforce our immigration laws and confront national security threats. In addition, USCIS is surging personnel to support its fraud detection efforts in hotspots across the county,” Matthew Tragesser, a national spokesman for USCIS, wrote in a Tuesday email.

Anti-ICE protests have erupted across the country, including in Vermont, since 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis this month. About 300 people protested in frigid weather outside the ICE facility in Williston on Tuesday evening.

ICE has since significantly ramped up immigration enforcement in Minnesota with more than 3,000 federal officers dispatched there as part of President Donald Trump’s promised crackdown.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Monday that the department had arrested “over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens” in Minneapolis, including 3,000 in the last six weeks — numbers that some experts doubt are real, The Hill reported.

Lawyers allege that detainees are being denied legal counsel there and an appeals court has suspended a decision that restricts the aggressive tactics used by ICE against protestors in Minnesota.

This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To learn more, visit vtdigger.org/community-news-sharing-project.