(This is a guest editorial by Emma Pullman, head of shareholder engagement and responsible investment at the British Columbia General Employees’ Union (BCGEU) in Canada, a minority shareholder in Thomson Reuters, and Sarah Lamdan, a lawyer and librarian who researches and writes about library vendors and service providers, and who wrote a 2019 law review article on the legal ethics related to the use of Thomson Reuters’ products by ICE. Their bios are at the end of the editorial.)

Thomson Reuters is one of the world’s largest data corporations, owner of Westlaw, Reuters news service, and the CLEAR investigative platform. As one of the nation’s most significant data brokers, the Toronto-based company sells access to billions of personal data points, drawn from thousands of sources, to insurance companies, financial institutions, and U.S. government agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Scrutiny of the company is now at a peak. Next week, shareholders will vote on a resolution asking Thomson Reuters to commission and publish an independent human rights impact assessment of how its products are used by law enforcement and immigration enforcement agencies. The proposal was filed by the BC General Employees’ Union (BCGEU), a long-time shareholder that has been engaging the company on this issue since 2020, though the company’s relationship with ICE predates that by years.

When ICE began building its “Extreme Vetting” program in 2017, Thomson Reuters signed on to help construct what has become the largest commercial data surveillance infrastructure in the United States. The company has entered into contracts with ICE worth tens of millions of dollars. ICE has described Thomson Reuters’ data services as “mission critical” to its operations and has integrated the company’s data into tools including Motorola’s license plate readers, PenLink’s live location tracking, and Palantir’s software.

Despite this documented record — established through public contract disclosures, extensive investigative reporting, fact-checked books on immigration surveillance, and congressional testimony — Thomson Reuters maintains that it is not providing ICE with surveillance tools. Lawmakers at a congressional hearing on data brokers and the Department of Homeland Security treated the company’s data-sharing arrangements with ICE as established fact. The company’s response has consistently been that critics are “misunderstanding” how its products work.

The scrutiny has not been limited to outsiders. Hundreds of Thomson Reuters employees signed a letter calling for greater transparency. Two employees who raised concerns internally were allegedly terminated, prompting a whistleblower lawsuit and an unfair labor practice complaint.

The company’s position rests on a narrow framing: it provides access to records that are already public, not records requiring a warrant. But this argument confuses the nature of individual data points with the nature of aggregated surveillance. It is also worth asking the obvious question: if Thomson Reuters is simply repackaging freely available public records, why does ICE pay it millions of dollars for the service?

The answer lies in what CLEAR actually does. The platform allows users to retrieve thousands of data points about any individual: current and historical addresses, known associates and family members, vehicle information, employment history, phone numbers, financial records, and location history. It can map social networks: who someone lives with, who they call, who they are connected to. It aggregates data from social media, and according to published reporting, in some cases dating profiles; the kind of intimate personal information shared in contexts people reasonably assume are private.

This is not incidental to CLEAR’s design. The platform was built specifically to help users locate and identify individuals. That is the functional definition of surveillance. The fact that the underlying data was gathered through commercial means rather than a wiretap or physical search does not alter what the tool produces.

Modern surveillance operates precisely this way; by aggregating the data traces left by ordinary life and fusing them into a profile that reveals far more than any single data point would suggest. CLEAR’s power is not derived from any one piece of information, but from their combination, assembled instantly, at scale, and on demand.

Thomson Reuters is quick to point out that CLEAR does not include an immigration status field. That is, at best, a technically accurate but purposefully incomplete answer. ICE agents do not need a field labeled “immigration status” to make immigration status determinations. The inferences available from CLEAR’s data are substantial. An individual’s use of an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number instead of a Social Security Number. Residence in a state where driver’s licenses require proof of citizenship. Regular international wire transfers. Absence from voter rolls, military service records, or federal employment databases. An address associated with immigrant worker housing. Employment in cash-wage sectors. Prepaid phones and money orders rather than credit-based financial products. All of these data points are available through CLEAR.

Moreover, Thomson Reuters provides access to immigration court proceeding records, visa records, I-94 arrival and departure records, and E-Verify non-confirmation records. The platform generates “risk scores,” “confidence scores,” and “verification failure” flags for individuals who cannot be fully verified through standard U.S. documentation. Its network analysis tools map connections between flagged and unflagged individuals; its geolocation and pattern analysis infers travel behavior.

In practice, an ICE agent entering a name or address into CLEAR can generate a profile showing that a person has no SSN-associated credit history, uses an ITIN, lives at known worker housing, is employed in agriculture, and is in regular contact with someone who has immigration court records. That profile enables the agent to decide whether to investigate further. The absence of a single labeled field does not diminish the tool’s utility for immigration enforcement — it simply requires one additional inferential step.

Thomson Reuters employees, shareholders, and the hundreds of millions of people whose data the company monetizes deserve a candid account of what is being sold to ICE and how it is being used. The upcoming shareholder vote is an opportunity for Thomson Reuters to reiterate a commitment to trust and transparency. An independent, public human rights impact assessment would allow shareholders, employees, customers, and the public to evaluate the merit of the company’s existing approach and understand if improvements are necessary.

As immigration enforcement actions continue to intensify, we need more than words. Tell the whole truth, Thomson Reuters.

Emma Pullman is head of shareholder engagement and responsible investment at the British Columbia General Employees’ Union (BCGEU) in Canada. She works with issuers and company boards to improve corporate practices and enhance long-term company value with a focus on human rights due diligence and responsible AI governance. BCGEU is a minority shareholder in Thomson Reuters and has been urging it to conduct a human rights assessment of its products.

 

Sarah Lamdan is a lawyer and librarian who researches and writes about library vendors and service providers. Her article, “When Westlaw Fuels ICE Surveillance: Legal Ethics in the Era of Big Data Policing,” was published in the N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change in 2019. The views and opinions expressed in this article are her own and do not represent the views and opinions of her employer, organization, committee, or any other affiliated group.