Opening a credit card can put your current address into systems used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to records and internal company materials reviewed by 404 Media. The path is not magic, although the industry tends to prefer it look that way: banks send identifying information to credit bureaus, the bureaus supply credit header data to Thomson Reuters, and Thomson Reuters sells government agencies access to CLEAR, its investigative database.
For people dealing with ICE scrutiny, the practical result is blunt. An address given to a financial institution can become searchable by an enforcement agency without a warrant, according to 404 Media’s reporting. ICE can then combine that information with other records to decide where someone may live.
Credit header data is the identifying block attached to a credit report. The materials described by 404 Media list information such as full name, Social Security number, phone number, address and email address. The underlying credit report has stronger legal protections, but the header data has long been treated differently, creating the kind of loophole data brokers can drive a truck through.
How the data gets to ICE
404 Media said it obtained an internal supplier list for CLEAR that included “Equifax Credit Header Records” and “Experian Credit Header Records.” A Thomson Reuters employee familiar with CLEAR confirmed that supply chain to the outlet. Experian and Equifax did not respond to 404 Media’s requests for comment.
Thomson Reuters is best known publicly for Reuters, the news organization, but it also sells data products. CLEAR is its investigative tool for locating people and linking records from multiple sources. Law enforcement agencies are among its customers.
ICE buys access to CLEAR. 404 Media reported this month that ICE plans to pay Thomson Reuters $125 million for CLEAR access tied to immigration fraud investigations and what the agency describes as “voters fraud.” The report said ICE’s access is not limited to immigration enforcement.
The data also appears inside other ICE tooling. An internal ICE guide for ELITE, an app worked on by Palantir and used by ICE to identify neighborhoods for raids, lists CLEAR as a source for an address “confidence score,” according to 404 Media.
Data quality is part of the risk
The Thomson Reuters employee familiar with CLEAR told 404 Media that the records are not as clean as customers may assume. “The data quality is way worse than people expect,” the employee said. The person described mismatches created when records from different places get merged, such as a person being associated with a relative’s address because of a shared bill.
That matters because location data does not need to be perfect to cause harm. A bad address in an investigative database can still point officers at a home, a workplace or a neighborhood.
Laura Rivera, an attorney at Just Futures Law, told 404 Media that people are often surprised to learn that opening a credit card or phone account can expose home address information to data brokers. She said credit bureaus receive address updates quickly and share them widely because of gaps in privacy law. Rivera said the trade especially harms overpoliced communities, including Black and Brown people, immigrants and people seeking reproductive care.
Sen. Ron Wyden criticized the practice in a statement to 404 Media. “No one signing up for a credit card thinks they're giving data brokers a thumbs-up to sell their personal information to ICE,” Wyden said. He added that Americans cannot meaningfully opt out.
Thomson Reuters previously told 404 Media it was inaccurate to connect CLEAR to ICE deportation and enforcement operations. After questions about the $125 million contract, a spokesperson said the company prohibits using CLEAR to identify and locate noncriminal immigrants or undocumented people for deportation based only on immigration status, and said the company enforces that restriction.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, asked recently about investigative capabilities, told 404 Media that ICE uses technology to investigate criminal activity and support law enforcement. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had proposed a rule addressing the sale of credit header data, according to Wyden, but he said the Trump administration killed it along with the rest of the bureau.
This story draws on original reporting from 404 Media.
