Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) intends to renew a contract with Thomson Reuters Special Services (TRSS), a subsidiary of data broker giant Thomson Reuters, at up to $25 million per year for up to five years — a dramatic increase from the previous equivalent deal, which was worth $24 million total over five years. The contract renewal was disclosed in a document published in a federal contract register on July 17, 2026.
According to the document, ICE cites an urgent, “multiplied” demand for data to identify “unaccompanied minors” and anyone involved in “any type of fraud of government funds.” The document states that “due to ICE’s re-prioritized mission,” data must be readily accessible to support “the identification of Voters fraud, Immigration Fraud, and National Security.”
The document does not explain why ICE — rather than the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which typically oversees unaccompanied minors — would need to identify such children. Thomson Reuters spokesperson Kat Hanley told WIRED the identification work may include “vetting the sponsors of children entering the country” to ensure their “welfare and safety.”
The contract would maintain ICE’s access to several Thomson Reuters databases, including CLEAR, which provides public records and license plate reader data sourced from Vigilant Solutions (now owned by Motorola); CABS, which pulls recent incarceration and law enforcement contact records including “real-time alerting on last known location data”; Westlaw, a court records database; and RTIA and TEA, which feed into a “risk intelligence” platform called RAPID. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims TRSS is “the only contractor” capable of providing continuous monitoring of up to one million individuals with real-time alerts and risk scoring.
ICE has purchased data from Thomson Reuters since 2008, but the scope of this renewal suggests the Trump administration is significantly expanding how that data is used by federal immigration officials. Unaccompanied minors are ordinarily under the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within HHS, though ICE agents were granted additional access to ORR’s tracking database in February of the previous year.
Representatives for ICE, DHS, and HHS did not respond to requests for comment.
Source: WIRED