ICE moved to renew $25M-a-year Thomson Reuters data-broker contract to identify unaccompanied minors and flag alleged fraud

On July 14, 2026, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) published a document in the federal contract register disclosing its intent to renew a sole-source data-broker contract with Thomson Reuters Special Services (TRSS), a Thomson Reuters subsidiary, at up to $25 million per year for as long as five years -- more than five times the value of the prior five-year, $24 million agreement. The filing states ICE's "re-prioritized mission" requires the data to be "readily accessible to support the presidential mandate of the identification of Voters fraud, Immigration Fraud, and National Security," and separately says the data would help identify "unaccompanied minors," a population whose care has historically fallen to the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), not ICE. Thomson Reuters spokesperson Kat Hanley told WIRED the company's work may include "vetting the sponsors of children entering the country," but a government employee with knowledge of the process said TRSS's proprietary databases would now be used by DHS agents, including ICE, to background-check prospective sponsors -- a role ORR staff performed independently in the past.

The contract would preserve ICE's access to several TRSS databases: the Consolidated Lead Evaluation and Reporting (CLEAR) platform, which includes license-plate-reader data sourced since 2017 from Vigilant Solutions; the Continuous Alerting Batch Solution (CABS), which tracks people's contact with law enforcement and "real-time" location data; and Westlaw court-records access. DHS's filing describes TRSS as the only contractor able to provide "continuous monitoring of up to one million individuals and entities" with "event-driven monitoring" and "model-based risk scoring," without detailing what events or risks the system flags. Advocates for unaccompanied children, including Kids in Need of Defense vice president Jason Boyd, said the expanding DHS role in sponsor vetting has already narrowed the pool of eligible sponsors and extended children's average time in ORR custody to more than 190 days as of spring 2026.