Documents Detail ICE Program to Train Civilians in Surveillance and Arrests

Since 2014, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has operated a secretive program in which ICE agents train civilian volunteers in the operation of firearms, surveillance of immigrants, and use of lethal force against others.

ICE describes its courses, called Citizens Academies, as a way to educate civilians “intrigued by the Enforcement and Removal Operations Unit mission.” That unit’s mission, according to ICE’s website, is the “arrest and removal of aliens.”

Volunteers also participate in simulations of drug busts, executions of warrants, surveillance of immigrants, and detentions, some of which feature violent or shoot-to-kill maneuvers taught in Citizens Academies by ICE agents. ICE has planned or conducted multi-week Citizens Academies in over two dozen U.S. cities and had planned at least 30 courses in 2020.

The scope and details of Citizens Academies were not known until October 2024, when ICE produced documents in response to litigation filed by Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). For the first time, agency documents detail ICE’s decade-long initiative to engage civilians in surveillance, detention, and weapons training.

Over 6 to 10 weeks, groups of about 20 civilians participate in Citizens Academies, meeting for 2 to 4 hours weekly, and up to 8 hours for firearm trainings. Civilian participants are instructed by federal agents from ICE’s two enforcement offices, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), sometimes in cooperation with local law enforcement.

ICE’s website lists the Academies as outreach programs designed to strengthen ties with local leaders and to promote community cooperation by teaching participants about HSI’s offices, operations, and “how to partner with [ICE-HSI] to improve the safety and security of our local communities.”

At Citizens Academies, participants conduct “mock investigations, learn defense tactics and even participated in mock surveillance,” according to HSI Executive Associate Director Derek Brenner. Invitations sent by ICE to Chicagoans in 2020 advertised “scenario-based training” that included “defensive tactics, firearms familiarization, and targeted arrests,” all centered on interactions with immigrants.

Participants in one Kansas City Citizens Academy spent their second and third weeks on live weapons fire and on what agents call a “takedown night.” Live-fire scenarios appear integral to Citizens Academy agendas, and ammunition is included in the cost of the course.

In Kansas City, internal ICE emails show that HSI agents prepared a 3-hour “room clearing instruction” activity with scenarios that placed civilian participants in the role of ICE agents or local officers entering a “shoot house” to arrest suspects for drug trafficking and firearm possession. Two of the four simulated arrests on HSI’s agenda are tagged with the instruction “This is a SHOOT scenario no other outcome should happen.”

Congressmembers Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Robin Kelley (D-Ill.) of the House Judiciary Committee wrote to ICE’s Acting Director in 2020 requesting information on Citizen Academy participants’ use of real or simulated firearms. ICE did not publicly respond to the legislators, but Congress’s request for basic information—How many Academies are there? Where have Academies been held? On what criteria does ICE select participants?—highlights how little was known about Citizens Academies outside of ICE-HSI before the 2024 FOIA lawsuit.

According to an internal memo, the ICE-HSI Citizen Academy program was first launched as a pilot in 2014 in Puerto Rico and expanded to ICE field offices during the first Trump Administration. OCAD noted that ICE hosted many Citizens Academies in sanctuary cities in cooperation with local law enforcement, including in several cities with policies “limiting information-sharing [by local police] with ICE in certain circumstances.”

Citizens Academies are neither schools nor academic programs, though ICE refers to past participants as “graduates,” and ICE agents present volunteers with certificates at “special ceremonies.”

But Citizens Academies are not open to all citizens. ICE has advertised that HSI and ERO Citizens Academies are open to community “stakeholders,” but they are usually not open to the public at large. Rather, ICE is strategic about whom it selects to invite, relying on existing relationships with news media and businesses to determine whom it invites to apply.

A memo prepared by HSI’s Executive Associate Director in 2020 or 2021 states that Citizens Academies are designed to counter “current negative opinion” toward ICE “fueled by harmful headlines or political views.” ICE views Citizens Academies as “critical and instrumental in changing that narrative and improving community relations,” according to the memo.

A 2022 “Communications Plan” lists the types of people ICE prioritized for recruitment: “Media, Hill, Academic leaders, Business/community leaders, Prosecutors and local and state law enforcement, Local citizens, Non-governmental organizations.” One Academy in Austin invited Texas Governor Greg Abbott to give a keynote speech to the graduating stakeholders, among whom were reporters from ABC and NPR, a community liaison from Austin’s police department, and three congressional staffers, according to an ICE email.

Although participants’ information is partially redacted in ICE documents, OCAD noted that employees at major American banks comprised a significant portion of Citizen Academy attendees, along with several legislative staffers at the state and national level. Victims advocates, criminal justice professors, local journalists, and religious leaders have also participated in Citizens Academies.

Among the documents released in October 2024 are training slideshows used in Citizen Academies, which include instruction on the two highest levels of force taught to ICE agents: hard techniques and deadly force.

So-called “hard techniques” include take-downs and riot baton strikes. ICE instructs participants using detailed maps showing where to strike someone with a baton or weapon in “vital and vulnerable striking areas.”

One ICE-HSI slideshow instructs participants on the legal standards for law enforcement officers’ use of lethal force, such as when they may fire at fleeing suspects or moving vehicles. In another slideshow, ICE-HSI includes instructions for civilian participants to yell “‘Police, drop the gun,’ while drawing and firing on the target,” as justification for using deadly force.

In 2020, ICE spokesperson Nicole Alberico told Newsweek that “ICE is not training anyone to do immigration enforcement” and that Citizens Academies “show the community what this training [for federal law enforcement officers] looks like.”

Many non-profit and community organizations have questioned the public benefit of Citizens Academies. Genia Blaser, hotline director at the Immigrant Defense Project, stated that ICE was “recruiting people who could incite vigilante violence in communities.” Congressmembers Jamie Raskin and Robin Kelley wrote that “role-playing exercises—complete with simulated firefights—are of dubious public benefit.”

Worries over vigilantism against immigrants has risen in recent years, especially along the Mexico–U.S. border, where armed civilian groups who claim to collaborate with police and immigration agents also film themselves “conducting patrols…issue orders, and detain and even point guns at migrants.” In 2024, Arizona lawmakers attempted to expand the state’s “castle doctrine” to allow property owners to use or threaten deadly force against trespassers anywhere on their farmland, and not just their home or yard. Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed the bill, stating that it valued “property over human life and incentivizes vigilantism.”

Months into the second Trump Administration, ICE officers have rounded up and deported tens of thousands non-citizens and U.S. citizens without presenting identification or warrants. ICE agents’ conduct during many arrests—plainclothes agents swarm a suspect, then pull them into an unmarked vehicle—makes it easier for civilians to kidnap or otherwise abuse people by impersonating ICE agents.

Civilians impersonating ICE have proliferated in 2025, with prominent cases in South Carolina, California, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Washington. The Democratic Women’s Caucus wrote to DHS and ICE about a spike in ICE impersonators attacking women, citing several reports of men in ICE gear using threats of violence or deportation to assault and sexually assault women. The Congresswomen argue that ICE protocols excusing agents from showing official badges and photo identification endangers law enforcement legitimacy and citizens, also noting that “fake ICE jackets became a ‘best seller’ on Amazon in February of this year.”

Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons defended the use of masks to protect ICE agents and their families, citing death threats and harassments towards agents while emphasizing the agency’s singular focus on deportations in line with President Trump’s policy goals.

No ICE official has commented on ICE-HSI Citizens Academies since the October 2024 document release. Although the annual number of Citizens Academies is unknown, hundreds of Americans graduate from ICE’s programs each year.