ICE's $125M CLEAR Contract Now Targets 'Voter Fraud'

The Department of Homeland Security is about to pay one of the world's largest information companies $125 million over five years for continued access to a database most Americans have never heard of, and for the first time, the paperwork says that database can be used to hunt "voter fraud." Procurement documents reviewed by 404 Media show DHS agreeing to pay Thomson Reuters Special Services roughly $25 million a year so Immigration and Customs Enforcement keeps its pipeline into CLEAR, a data aggregation platform that pulls together location history, social media activity, property records, license plate scans, and personal records on hundreds of millions of people. The contract language ties the arrangement to a "presidential mandate," and it lists voter fraud investigations alongside immigration fraud and national security as approved uses, a first for any Thomson Reuters and ICE contract made public so far.

Key Takeaways

• DHS is set to pay Thomson Reuters Special Services $125 million over five years, about $25 million annually, for continued and expanded access to the CLEAR data aggregation platform, according to procurement documents obtained by 404 Media.
• The new contract explicitly lists "voter fraud" as an approved use case for the first time in any public Thomson Reuters and ICE agreement, alongside immigration fraud and national security investigations.
• CLEAR gives ICE access to names, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, addresses, geolocation data, and license plate records, largely without a warrant.
• Procurement language says the platform lets ICE "continuously monitor millions of people and entities of interest," and ties the contract to a "presidential mandate."
• Nearly 170 Thomson Reuters employees petitioned management on February 20, 2026, over fears CLEAR was enabling human rights abuses, and Billie Little, the employee who helped lead that effort, was fired weeks later and has since sued the company.

What Data Does CLEAR Give ICE Access To?

CLEAR gives ICE agents a searchable profile on nearly anyone, built from personal records most people never agreed to share with the government. Thomson Reuters markets CLEAR to law enforcement, insurers, and corporate investigators as a way to aggregate public records, credit header data, utility hookups, vehicle registrations, and social media activity into a single lookup. According to reporting from 404 Media, the platform ICE accesses under this contract includes names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and details on a person's ethnicity, along with geolocation information pulled in part from a network of license plate readers. Because CLEAR draws on commercially licensed data rather than data seized under a warrant, ICE can query most of it without going through a judge, a workaround that has become common as agencies buy location data directly from ad tech companies to sidestep Fourth Amendment protections that would otherwise apply to a direct search of someone's records.

The scale is what distinguishes CLEAR from a normal records check. The procurement documents reviewed by 404 Media describe a system that lets ICE "continuously monitor millions of people and entities of interest," not run one off searches. Earlier 404 Media reporting on the broader relationship between Thomson Reuters, ICE, and Palantir found CLEAR data integrated into tools ICE uses to identify neighborhoods to target for enforcement sweeps, turning a commercial marketing and fraud detection database into a piece of federal surveillance infrastructure.

Why Does the Contract List 'Voter Fraud' as a Target?

This is the first Thomson Reuters and ICE contract to name voter fraud as an explicit, approved use case for CLEAR, expanding the platform's federal role beyond immigration enforcement into election related investigations. Previous public contracts between DHS and Thomson Reuters centered on immigration fraud and national security screening. The new procurement language adds voter fraud to that list and links the expanded access to what it calls a "presidential mandate," though the documents reviewed by reporters do not specify a single executive order or directive by name. The practical effect is that a database built from commercial and public records, one that already includes Social Security numbers and ethnicity data, can now be queried in the name of investigating claims about who is and is not eligible to vote, a use case civil liberties groups have long warned could be used to profile and intimidate eligible voters rather than uncover actual fraud, which studies have repeatedly found to be rare in U.S. elections.

Why Are Thomson Reuters Employees Objecting?

Thomson Reuters employees are objecting because they believe the company's own data products are enabling the kind of unlawful surveillance and human rights abuses their employer has publicly committed to avoiding. On February 20, 2026, roughly 170 Thomson Reuters employees, organized as the self described Committee to Restore Trust, sent management a letter warning that CLEAR could be facilitating unlawful ICE conduct and asking for greater transparency about how the company oversees its DHS and ICE contracts, according to NPR. Billie Little, a nearly two decade Thomson Reuters employee who helped lead the committee, was fired on March 20, 2026, weeks after the internal letter became public, for what the company described only as a Code of Conduct violation. Little says she was never told what she was accused of violating or shown supporting documentation. She has since filed a lawsuit in Oregon alleging the termination violated state whistleblower protection law. A Thomson Reuters spokesperson told NPR the company "strongly dispute[s] the allegations and intend[s] to robustly defend the case." A Change.org petition tied to the effort calls on Thomson Reuters to suspend its ICE data contracts pending an independent human rights audit and to reinstate Little.

The concern is not hypothetical. Government contracts with data brokers and technology vendors have repeatedly turned into liabilities once the vendor's own records became public, as seen when hacktivists leaked the names of 6,681 companies working with ICE, including employee emails and tax IDs. Employees inside those vendors are increasingly the ones raising the alarm before a breach or a lawsuit forces the issue into public view.

What Are Shareholders Demanding?

Thomson Reuters shareholders are demanding the company's board formally investigate whether its data products have contributed to human rights violations through the ICE contracts. On April 15, 2026, shareholders filed a proposal explicitly citing multiple 404 Media investigations, including reporting on CLEAR's role in helping ICE identify neighborhoods to target, as grounds for an independent review. The pressure follows a pattern rather than breaking one: Thomson Reuters agreed in 2022 to adopt the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, committing to ongoing human rights due diligence, but has not exited any of its ICE contracts since, even as the value and scope of those contracts have grown.

What Happens Next?

None of the pressure so far, not the employee petition, not Little's lawsuit, not the shareholder proposal, has stopped Thomson Reuters from expanding its ICE relationship. The $125 million contract is proceeding, and the addition of voter fraud as a named use case suggests DHS intends to widen how CLEAR gets used, not narrow it. Thomson Reuters maintains it prohibits CLEAR from being used to locate noncriminal immigrants for deportation based solely on immigration status, but that policy line does not obviously cover voter fraud queries built on Social Security numbers and ethnicity data. Data broker contracts do sometimes end under enough public pressure, as the Los Angeles Police Department showed when it let its Flock Safety license plate camera contract lapse rather than renew it without clearer data ownership terms, but that reversal took a damning internal audit, not just employee and shareholder objections.

For now, the fight over CLEAR's role inside ICE is playing out in a lawsuit, a shareholder vote, and a stack of procurement paperwork, not in any court ruling that limits what the platform can be used for. Anyone whose personal records were ever aggregated into CLEAR, which is to say a very large share of the country, is a subject of that fight whether they know it or not.