The Department of Homeland Security plans to buy five years of access to Thomson Reuters data for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media. The proposed deal would pay Thomson Reuters Special Services $25 million a year, or $125 million total, for data ICE says it needs for voter fraud, immigration fraud and national security investigations.
The records describe a familiar government workaround for surveillance at scale: do not build the database, rent it from a broker. Thomson Reuters is best known to the public for Reuters, the news organization. It also sells investigative data products to government and corporate customers through CLEAR, a system Thomson Reuters says combines public and proprietary records.
According to 404 Media, the data available through CLEAR includes names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, social media material, geolocation data, property records and license plate data. 404 Media also reported that an internal list of CLEAR sources includes credit header data, the identity and address information people provide to financial institutions that can later flow through credit bureaus and data vendors.
What ICE says it wants
The DHS procurement document says ICE needs fast access to this data because of what it calls a changed mission. The document says the data would support a presidential mandate to identify “Voters Fraud, Immigration Fraud and National Security,” and says the records can be used to verify eligibility tied to schools, benefits, immigration and other programs.
The filing also says Thomson Reuters Special Services can provide access in bulk and can run ongoing monitoring and alerts across “millions of individuals and entities of interest.” That is the operational core of the deal. ICE is not asking for a one-off lookup tool. The records describe batch access and continuous alerting, which lets an agency watch large sets of people or organizations as underlying data changes.
Thomson Reuters Special Services, the subsidiary named in the planned contract, often handles the company’s government work. The procurement document says the unit can provide embedded data scientists with clearances up to Top Secret/SCI, short for Sensitive Compartmented Information.
DHS components have used CLEAR before. 404 Media has reported that internal ICE records describe CLEAR data as integrated with Palantir software used by ICE to identify neighborhoods for raids. The new procurement records say ICE’s demand for CLEAR data has grown, citing urgency around unaccompanied minors and people suspected of fraud involving government funds.
Thomson Reuters says it limits immigration use
Thomson Reuters previously told 404 Media that connecting CLEAR to ICE deportation and enforcement operations was inaccurate. After 404 Media sent the company the new procurement document, Thomson Reuters said it bars customers from using CLEAR to identify and locate noncriminal immigrants or undocumented people for deportation based only on immigration status.
“We take this restriction seriously, and we enforce it,” the company told 404 Media. Thomson Reuters also said it provides technology for investigations involving national security and public safety, including child exploitation, human trafficking, narcotics and weapons trafficking, and fraud or financial crime. The company added that “Immigration status is not a search field in CLEAR.”
The proposed contract arrives after President Donald Trump held a Thursday press conference about election security, as reported by NPR, and after The New York Times reported that ICE agents fatally shot two people in a week. 404 Media has also reported that Thomson Reuters fired a longtime employee who criticized the company’s sale of data products to ICE, and that ICE staff were invited to demos of a Motorola license plate reader app that could be enhanced with CLEAR data.
This story draws on original reporting from 404 Media.
