Acadis is one of Bloomington’s most successful companies. Law enforcement, the military, first responders and other public sector agencies rely on its software to track employee training.
The Department of Homeland Security is one of the biggest clients of Acadis, formerly Envisage Technologies and now part of Vector Solutions.
Since President Trump took office again in 2025, Acadis won two more contracts with those agencies worth more than $3 million each.
Both agencies have long drawn scrutiny for their treatment of undocumented immigrants, but they’ve been under intense pressure since the second Trump administration began using them for mass arrests, mass deportations and a system of new detention camps for noncitizens.
The killing of two U.S. citizens by CBP and ICE officers in Minneapolis last month has raised questions about their training and local scrutiny about their Bloomington contractor.
Acadis has no role in developing DHS learning materials, nor does it have eyes on them. Rather, its technology allows those agencies to track employees’ training.
But Bloomington protesters like Pat Wall of the Bloomington Democratic Socialists of America say even that is too much.
“Even if it's just in a small way, I don't want that here,” he said. “I don't want bad things to happen near where I live.”
Wall said ICE could easily find a new service if Acadis pulled out, but protesters want to fight the agency through attrition. To them, even a small operational hurdle would be a victory in the context of bigger efforts, and Acadis happens to be a local piece of that machine.
“If my hypothesis or my operating theory is correct, and breaking these little pieces of the machine matters, we just have to play whack-a-mole,” Wall said.
A long relationship with ICE and CPB
The Acadis relationship with DHS extends almost to the origins of both.
Launched as Envisage in 2001 by early internet entrepreneur Ari Vidali and IU alumnus Brad Tubbs, the small company quickly became a preferred contractor for the new department.
The Bush administration launched the DHS in March 2003 to incorporate immigration, emergency management, secret service and other operations under one umbrella.
CBP signed its first contract with Envisage in 2004. ICE, then a new agency created by the Homeland Security Act, awarded a contract several months later. Other parts of DHS, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and Transportation Security Administration, have also worked with Acadis consistently for the past 20 years.
That trust is a point of pride for Acadis, which lauded its relationship with ICE as recently as October.
Those relationships seem likely to continue for at least the next decade. In 2024 Vector Solutions (by then the parent company for Acadis) secured a ten-year partnership with the CPB.
“We are honored to continue supporting CBP in their mission to safeguard our nation’s borders and ensure the safety and security of all Americans,” Vidali said in a 2024 press release.
Vector Solutions Vice President Victoria Zambito declined an interview request from WFIU but reiterated Acadis supports administrative oversight, not policy or training.
As ICE put it in last year’s award, the agency uses Acadis software “to maintain and administer all the required ICE training and professional courses for the agency to maintain accreditation.”
Acadis argues that without a stable learning management system, delays in mandatory certification can prevent new officers from becoming certified and field-ready.
That would be a problem for ICE. Since the second Trump administration began, the DHS has rushed to hire and deploy 12,000 new officers to meet its goal of one million deportations a year, according to the department. In doing so, it cut the required length of training from 16 weeks to six.
Since Acadis was designed for public agencies, it says it helps law enforcement “maintain operational readiness” more effectively than learning software developed with corporate training in mind.
But like many work-mandated courses, hours of instruction on Acadis can sometimes be bypassed in minutes. That’s what 70 Massachusetts police officers did in 2024, “using techniques that override controls meant to prevent fast-forwarding through the training,” according to the state’s Municipal Police Training Committee.
Massachusetts temporarily shut down its Acadis police training portal during the investigation, although it continues to use the software today. Vector did not respond to a question about the incident.
Financial support from local government
While its parent company Vector Technologies is headquartered in Tampa, Fla., Acadis keeps its offices in Bloomington, where it was founded.
The city and state have spent more than a million dollars to keep Acadis in town.
In 2009, before ICE and Border Patrol earned the reputation they have now, the company considered leaving the state, looking at Falls Church, Va., and San Antonio to meet anticipated growth.
Not wanting to miss out on high-paying jobs and substantial tax revenue, Bloomington City Council offered Envisage $545,000 to relocate and renovate space in downtown’s Fountain Square Mall. The money came from several funds allocated for economic development.
The Indiana Economic Development Corporation, a state program, contributed another $450,000 in tax credits for the company’s expansion and retention.
Over the next eight years, the company doubled its Bloomington workforce. In 2017, Chief Financial Officer David Haeberle told City Council the company needed more space to stay in Fountain Square Mall.
That was still early in the first Trump term, and ICE wasn’t the lightning rod it would become a year or so later.
The council approved a $300,000 incentive to expand the company’s headquarters, conditioned on Envisage meeting certain benchmarks for salary and job growth.
The Bloomington company changed its name to Acadis from Envisage Technologies, and it was acquired by software company Vector Solutions in 2021.
A question to the current mayoral administration about whether this was a good use of city funds did not receive a response in time for publication.
The question of complicity
Because of the nature of Acadis’s work for the DHS, Wall said it’s hard to say how complicit he feels the company is in its operations. But he said any blame he would assign primarily to management.
“I don't know that I can say how much they are complicit, other than I do think that they are complicit,” Wall said. “Even if it's a small part, it is a part of this machine that is enabling what's happening in Minneapolis to happen.”
He said if he had a chance to speak with Acadis and Vector leaders, he’d ask them whether they feel like they are.
We relayed the question to Vidali. He did not respond to a request for comment.
