On March 11, 2026, some 200 staff of Thomson Reuters – lots of them based mostly on the firm’s Westlaw operations in St. Paul, Minn. – sent a letter to management with an unequivocal demand: Don’t renew the corporate’s $22.8 million contract with ICE, set to run out on Could 31.
(See Half 1 of this two-part submit: tech-giants-powering-ice-part-1-how-thomson-reuters-and-lexisnexis-helped-support-americas-immigration-surveillance-machine.html”>How Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis Helped Assist America’s Immigration Surveillance Machine.)
The identical week, greater than 200 journalists at Law360 and different publications owned by RELX, the mother or father firm of LexisNexis, signed their very own letter demanding that RELX end its $22.1 million DHS contract and stop offering LexisNexis Danger Options’ database entry for immigration enforcement.
These simultaneous revolts – with staff and journalists throughout two of the authorized trade’s most essential firms, all performing throughout the similar month – signify probably the most vital inside challenges these contracts have confronted of their two-decade historical past.
However they didn’t emerge out of nowhere. They adopted years of shareholder activism, civil society organizing, litigation and a scholarly debate concerning the moral obligations of attorneys who use analysis merchandise linked to authorities surveillance.
The Minnesota Context
The March 2026 worker letters were motivated by events unfolding within the very communities the place many Thomson Reuters staff dwell and work.
Throughout the winter of 2025–2026, the federal authorities intensified immigration enforcement exercise within the Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan space, with reporting indicating hundreds of arrests throughout a number of operations.
Two deadly incidents involving federal brokers drew explicit public consideration. On Jan. 7, 2026, Renée Nicole Good was shot and killed by an ICE officer. On Jan. 24, 2026, Alex Pretti was shot and killed by a U.S. Customs and Border Safety agent in a separate incident.
In January 2026, the United Nations high human rights official called for investigation of the shootings, elevating considerations that they might have concerned extreme or illegal use of power. Individually, courtroom challenges to facets of the enforcement exercise have resulted in some arrests being dominated illegal, in response to reporting, although the scope and authorized foundation of these rulings fluctuate by case.
For Thomson Reuters staff in St. Paul – lots of whom work on the Westlaw platform and are deeply embedded in the local people – the juxtaposition became untenable. The corporate that employed them was offering the very instruments that have been aiding ICE in finding and arresting their neighbors.
That led to the letter signed by greater than 200 Thomson Reuters staff, through which they questioned “if our investigative services are being utilized in accordance with our mission and values, in addition to in accordance with the legislation and our nation’s Structure.”
Once I requested Thomson Reuters concerning the considerations its staff raised within the letter, it supplied me with a press release saying it “proceed[s] to work with our clients, offering expertise and providers that assist investigations into areas of nationwide safety and public security, akin to youngster exploitation, human trafficking, narcotics and weapons trafficking and monetary crime.”
Internally, nonetheless, the corporate did take steps to handle its staff’ considerations, in response to a supply aware of the corporate’s response.
That supply mentioned that Thomson Reuters held one-on-one conversations with involved staff, organized small group listening periods each in-person and nearly, printed an inside weblog submit addressing the difficulty, and convened a company-wide all-hands assembly with CEO Steve Hasker. The corporate additionally made its 24/7 Worker Help Program obtainable for workers searching for personalised and confidential assist.
However, in response to The Baron, the corporate additionally shut down dialogue of the ICE contracts on its inside communications platform, a transfer which will have undercut the conciliatory tone of the listening periods. Staff subsequently organized on Sign and different channels exterior company management.
And now, Billie Little, an Oregon-based senior attorney-editor at Thomson Reuters who organized the protest letter, has been fired by the corporate, she alleges in a whistleblower lawsuit she just lately filed, in response to her complaint and to reviews by 404 Media and NPR.
The BCGEU’s Lengthy Marketing campaign
If the March 2026 worker letters signify probably the most dramatic inside problem to those contracts, probably the most direct exterior stress has come from a Canadian public staff’ union.
The British Columbia Normal Staff’ Union (BCGEU), which represents 95,000 members and is a long-term minority investor in Thomson Reuters, has been urgent the corporate on its ICE contracts since 2019, in a marketing campaign led by the union’s Capital Stewardship Program.
In 2020, the BCGEU launched a report back to shareholders calling for an assessment of human rights risks associated to the ICE contracts. At that 12 months’s annual assembly, it introduced a shareholder proposal asking Thomson Reuters to undertake the UN Guiding Rules on Enterprise and Human Rights. The proposal acquired assist from roughly 30 % of impartial buyers.
In 2021, the BCGEU resubmitted the proposal. This time, assist surged to 70 % of impartial buyers – a putting stage of endorsement. In 2022, underneath mounting stress, Thomson Reuters agreed to adopt the UN Guiding Principles, committing to human rights due diligence. However the firm didn’t exit any of its ICE contracts.
In June 2025, the BCGEU submitted a new proposal asking Thomson Reuters to increase the UN Guiding Rules framework to its AI governance – an essential escalation given the combination of generative AI into CLEAR.
The proposal, detailed in an investor brief written by Emma Pullman, head of shareholder engagement and accountable funding at BCGEU, argued that Thomson Reuters’ legacy 1941 Belief Rules – initially designed to safeguard journalistic independence – have been insufficient for governing a expertise firm’s human rights dangers.
Glass Lewis, one of many largest proxy advisory corporations, recommended shareholders vote in favor of the BCGEU proposal.
The proposal acquired assist from roughly 20 % of impartial shareholders – decrease than earlier years, however the lower was probably defined by the truth that Thomson Reuters had already formally adopted the UN Guiding Rules, making the incremental ask much less compelling to some buyers.
Requested concerning the board’s advice in opposition to the proposal, Thomson Reuters directed me to its 2025 proxy round, available on its investor relations website. In that doc, the corporate’s board of administrators beneficial in opposition to the BCGEU’s proposal, stating partly:
“At Thomson Reuters we prioritize protected, accountable growth and the moral use of synthetic intelligence (AI). Our proprietary content material and expertise, deep data of the professionals we serve and deal with knowledge privateness underscore Thomson Reuters dedication to a trusted buyer expertise. In furtherance of this dedication, Thomson Reuters has established a complete framework of AI governance and threat administration and the Board is of the view that the governance construction is well-suited for successfully overseeing accountable use and growth of AI.”
There’s, after all, a structural actuality that limits the sensible impression of any shareholder vote at Thomson Reuters, which is that roughly 70 % of the corporate’s shares are held by the Woodbridge Firm, the Thomson household’s funding automobile.
Law360 Journalists Protest
The March 2026 journalist letter at RELX – signed by greater than 200 staffers at Law360 and associated publications – added an additional dimension to the controversy. As Julianne Hill reported in the ABA Journal, the signatories expressed concern that RELX was “straight aiding the separation of households, the elimination of youngsters from colleges and the loss of life of people in detention facilities.”
The letter, posted by nearly 80% of unionized Law360 journalists, particularly referred to as out the LexisNexis Danger Options database for giving ICE the power to search out migrants’ dwelling and work areas and to determine their relations, citing privateness and authorized specialists.
“Given ICE’s document, it’s clear RELX is doing enterprise with a company that repeatedly flouts the ‘rule of legislation’ ideas the corporate says it upholds,” the letter mentioned.
For the authorized trade, the journalists’ motion was notable for a number of causes. First, it put stress on RELX from inside its personal media properties – the very publications that cowl the authorized trade – creating an acute reputational dilemma.
Second, it echoed the parallel Reuters journalists’ letter to Thomson Reuters management, demonstrating that inside opposition had emerged concurrently at each firms.
Lastly, it linked the ICE controversy on to the skilled identification of the very authorized journalists who cowl due course of, civil rights and the rule of legislation.
The Lawsuits
Authorized challenges have additionally performed a job in shaping the controversy, although with blended outcomes.
In 2020, activist Cat Brooks and different California plaintiffs filed a California class-action lawsuit alleging that Thomson Reuters’ CLEAR platform violated the privateness rights of roughly 40 million Californians by secretly gathering and promoting private knowledge with out consent.
In 2024, Thomson Reuters agreed to pay $27.5 million to settle the case. The settlement required the corporate to enhance its safeguards and knowledge retention insurance policies, and it established the authorized precept that CLEAR profiles may very well be constructed on people with out their data – even those that had taken steps to clean their knowledge from business databases.
On the LexisNexis facet, a coalition led by Simply Futures Legislation, the immigrant rights group Mijente, and Organized Communities Towards Deportations (OCAD), sued in Cook County, Illinois, in August 2022, alleging violations of the Illinois Shopper Fraud and Misleading Enterprise Practices Act.
The plaintiffs argued that LexisNexis collected and offered the non-public knowledge of immigrants with out consent, enabling ICE to conduct warrantless surveillance and circumvent Cook dinner County’s ICE Detainer Ordinance.
Particularly, the swimsuit alleged that LexisNexis supplied ICE with real-time incarceration knowledge that allowed brokers to arrest people in the meanwhile of their launch from jail, in violation of Illinois legislation.
In Could 2024, nonetheless, the advocacy organizations dropped the lawsuit. The phrases of the decision haven’t been publicly disclosed.
Congressional scrutiny has been minimal. Following the publication of LexisNexis contract particulars obtained via FOIA, U.S. Senators Edward Markey and Ron Wyden called on ICE to close down what Markey characterised as its data-gathering efforts. However no legislative motion resulted.
The Authorized Ethics Query
For attorneys and authorized professionals – the first clients of those firms – there may very well be moral implications in all of this.
Sarah Lamdan, a former professor at CUNY College of Legislation and now govt director of the American Library Affiliation’s Workplace for Mental Freedom, laid out the moral framework in a landmark 2019 article printed within the NYU Evaluation of Legislation and Social Change, “When Westlaw Fuels ICE Surveillance: Legal Ethics in the Era of Big Data Policing.”
Lamdan’s argument proceeds on a number of fronts. First, she raises the query of conflicts of curiosity underneath ABA Mannequin Rule 1.7. If an immigration legal professional, for instance, is obligated to pay Thomson Reuters for Westlaw entry, and Thomson Reuters is concurrently serving to ICE – which can be on the opposing facet within the legal professional’s immigration case – has the legal professional stumbled into an moral battle?
The likelihood that an legal professional helps ICE examine the legal professional’s personal purchasers will increase considerably when the legal professional makes use of authorized analysis merchandise that reserve the appropriate to share consumer knowledge throughout company subsidiaries, Lamdan argues.
Second, Lamdan examines confidentiality underneath Mannequin Rule 1.6. On the time of her 2019 article, neither Thomson Reuters nor RELX had promised that its authorized analysis merchandise have been impartial from the info providers offered to legislation enforcement.
Thomson Reuters’ privateness assertion explicitly states that the corporate shares consumer info “throughout the Thomson Reuters group, with our enterprise companions and third get together service suppliers … and in accordance with legislation.”
When Lamdan, in making ready her article, requested main authorized analysis firms whether or not authorized analysis consumer knowledge was utilized in surveillance platforms, Bloomberg Legislation instantly responded, stating that its product doesn’t save consumer knowledge, however Thomson Reuters representatives have been, in Lamdan’s account, “notably silent.”
In my very own reporting for this story, an individual aware of Thomson Reuters’ knowledge practices acknowledged unequivocally that Westlaw consumer knowledge – together with search histories, saved analysis and account info – just isn’t included in knowledge offered to legislation enforcement, and that shopper utilization info is handled as confidential.
Once I requested LexisNexis the identical query, it didn’t straight reply, apart from issuing the assertion I focus on later on this submit.
Third, Lamdan invokes Mannequin Rule 5.3, which requires attorneys to vet third-party distributors to make sure they use ethically sound practices. Underneath ABA steering, attorneys should think about distributors’ safety insurance policies, use confidentiality agreements, and confirm that distributors don’t have conflicts of curiosity.
But the privateness agreements that Westlaw and LexisNexis present to customers don’t make assurances that they may preserve the confidentiality and safety requirements required of the authorized occupation.
Lamdan’s final conclusion is a name to motion. Attorneys ought to think about whether or not their skilled ethics require them to diversify away from Westlaw and LexisNexis – or at minimal, to demand that these firms formally wall off their authorized analysis knowledge from their legislation enforcement merchandise.
“No conscientious lawyer can stand by idly when Westlaw and LexisNexis’s mother or father firms are constructing a ‘digital deportation machine’ with income from their lawyer clients,” she wrote. “As an alternative, attorneys ought to swap to different merchandise.”
The ABA has indirectly opined on whether or not utilizing merchandise linked to surveillance tasks violates confidentiality obligations. As Lamdan notes, that is partly as a result of on-line authorized analysis is a comparatively current phenomenon, and partly as a result of ABA ethics steering has centered on communications expertise slightly than analysis platforms.
However the query has grown extra pressing as these firms combine AI into their merchandise. When CLEAR’s generative AI threat summaries can robotically flag people based mostly on routine actions, and when the identical company infrastructure processes each a lawyer’s Westlaw search historical past and an ICE agent’s surveillance question, the moral distance between the 2 features narrows significantly.
The Civil Society Marketing campaign
The worker and shareholder efforts mentioned above have been bolstered by a broader civil society marketing campaign that has been sustained since 2018.
The #NoTechForICE marketing campaign, launched by the immigrant rights group Mijente, has maintained public pressure on each Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis for years. Key organizational participants embody Simply Futures Legislation, the Nationwide Immigrant Justice Heart, the Digital Privateness Data Heart (EPIC), the Venture On Authorities Oversight (POGO), and Organized Communities Towards Deportations.
In February 2023, a coalition of greater than 80 organizations wrote to then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas urging cancellation of the LexisNexis contract earlier than its Feb. 28 renewal date. DHS renewed the contract anyway.
The advocacy panorama additionally contains municipalities. In April 2019, the Berkeley Metropolis Council passed a Sanctuary Contracting Ordinance designed to forestall the town from getting into into contracts with companies that function knowledge brokers for ICE — a measure that might embody Thomson Reuters.
The Renewal Choice
As of this writing, the Thomson Reuters LEIDS-5 contract is about to run out on Could 31, 2026. No public announcement has been made about renewal.
The dynamics surrounding this choice are complicated. The contract’s worth – $22.8 million over 5 years – is modest relative to Thomson Reuters’ market capitalization of roughly $39 billion. However the reputational stakes are substantial, notably given the Minnesota enforcement context, the worker letter, and the BCGEU’s ongoing shareholder marketing campaign.
As I wrote partly one in all this two-part submit, It seems that Thomson Reuters did simply renew its separate contract to supply DHS with entry to CLEAR. That contract was set to run out on March 31, 2026, however was renewed as of that date, pursuant to a Sole Source Justification that acknowledged that solely CLEAR offers the vary of legislation enforcement knowledge the company requires. It appears that renewal will run via no less than subsequent 12 months and probably via 2029. I’ve requested Thomson Reuters to verify this however haven’t acquired a response particular to this query.
There’s some precedent for Thomson Reuters stepping again from ICE work. The corporate’s CBP CLEAR contract expired naturally in August 2024 with out renewal. The TRSS jail reserving alert contract expired round 2023 and was additionally not renewed, although its capabilities have been successfully assumed by LexisNexis.
On the governance entrance, Thomson Reuters has constructed out its human rights infrastructure since adopting the UN Guiding Rules in 2022.
In keeping with an individual aware of the corporate’s efforts, Thomson Reuters has established a Human Rights Steering Committee co-chaired by its chief authorized officer and chief individuals officer, and has just lately accomplished its second complete human rights impression evaluation, working with exterior consultants and authorized counsel.
The corporate expects to reveal key findings from the 2025 evaluation on its web site. The supply didn’t say whether or not these findings would handle the ICE contracts particularly.
In keeping with this similar supply, CLEAR is supported by a “strong” credentialing and compliance program that features routine buyer audits, monitoring for suspicious exercise, and required compliance acknowledgements at every login. Its phrases prohibit the redistribution of CLEAR knowledge by clients. The place misuse is recognized, the supply mentioned, the corporate acts promptly, and the response might embody termination of buyer entry.
Nevertheless, after I requested Thomson Reuters straight whether or not it locations particular limits on the needs for which ICE can use CLEAR, the corporate once more mentioned it will not touch upon buyer contracts.
On the LexisNexis facet, the outlook is totally different. DHS has renewed the LexisNexis contract at each possibility 12 months regardless of organized opposition, and LexisNexis maintains a separate contract with Customs and Border Safety worth up to $25.7 million that runs via roughly 2027.
LexisNexis knowledge additionally stays built-in into ICE’s Nationwide Legal Evaluation and Focusing on Heart infrastructure – that means that even when the ICE contract formally expires, the info entry might proceed via different channels.
LexisNexis Response: A Normal Assertion
I’ve already refereenced the response I acquired from Thomson Reuters. As well as, Thomson Reuters yesterday printed, Setting the Record Straight on Thomson Reuters CLEAR, The assertion is a response to “current media reporting [that ]has speculated about how our knowledge is utilized by authorities companies and third-party expertise platforms” and that, the corporate says, “displays misunderstandings about how our merchandise are ruled and safeguarded. ”
I additionally despatched LexisNexis a collection of particular questions on its ICE contracts, together with whether or not a successor contract was underneath negotiation, whether or not its knowledge continues to movement to ICE via different channels such because the NCATC, the way it responded to the Law360 journalists’ letter, whether or not authorized analysis consumer knowledge is firewalled from its Accurint platform, and whether or not it may present present figures on ICE personnel with entry to its methods.
LexisNexis didn’t straight reply any of those questions. As an alternative, the corporate supplied a normal assertion through which it described itself as “a mission-driven firm” that has “partnered with federal, state, native, and different public sector companies throughout america to assist public security, nationwide safety, the supply of authoritative authorized content material, and the safety of susceptible populations.”
The corporate added: “As a federal company inside DHS, ICE has used sure LexisNexis merchandise for a few years, throughout each Democratic and Republican administrations.”
Moderately than addressing my questions concerning the surveillance capabilities of its Accurint platform or its contracts with ICE’s enforcement divisions, the corporate pointed to a special service, noting that it offers digital and print legislation library supplies in immigration detention services, together with immigration statutes, case legislation, federal laws, and analysis instruments obtainable in a number of languages.
The corporate characterised this as supporting “due course of rights for people in ICE custody.”
LexisNexis mentioned it maintains governance constructions “designed to supervise how our choices are delivered and used, with a deal with accountable and applicable software,” however supplied no specifics.
What It Means for the Authorized Career
The story of Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis and ICE is in the end a narrative concerning the authorized occupation’s personal provide chain – and whether or not the occupation’s ethical and moral requirements prolong to the distributors that make fashionable observe potential.
The one conclusion that can not be prevented is that this: Each lawyer who pays for a Westlaw or LexisNexis subscription contributes, nonetheless not directly, to the income of firms that construct and preserve surveillance instruments for immigration enforcement.
The moral questions raised by Sarah Lamdan in 2019 – about conflicts of curiosity, confidentiality and vendor oversight – have solely grown extra urgent as these firms combine AI into their merchandise, as immigration enforcement intensifies, and because the individuals being surveilled more and more embody the purchasers that attorneys signify.
The authorized analysis market has modified since Lamdan first wrote concerning the Westlaw-LexisNexis duopoly. Whereas no different competitor but matches the excellent citator and headnote methods that Westlaw and LexisNexis have constructed over a long time, the options are extra viable than they have been even just a few years in the past – and their suppliers aren’t concerned in legislation enforcement surveillance.
The query, because the Could 31 deadline approaches, is whether or not the authorized occupation will proceed to deal with this as another person’s drawback – or whether or not the identical attorneys who delight themselves on due course of, civil rights and the rule of legislation will demand accountability from the distributors they rely on most.
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