Last month, I wrote about the pushback by employees, shareholders and others against Thomson Reuters over its contracts to sell law enforcement data to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), primarily through two products: CLEAR (Consolidated Lead Evaluation and Reporting), which provides personal data from a variety of public and non-public sources, and license plate [\u2026]<\/p>\n
Last month, I wrote about the pushback<\/a> by employees, shareholders and others against Thomson Reuters over its contracts to sell law enforcement data to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), primarily through two products: CLEAR (Consolidated Lead Evaluation and Reporting), which provides personal data from a variety of public and non-public sources, and license plate recognition data, which contains more than 20 billion license plate scans.<\/p>\n In that article, I wrote about the campaign against these contracts conducted since 2019 by the British Columbia General Employees\u2019 Union (BCGEU), which is a long-term minority investor in Thomson Reuters. The BCGEU has repeatedly urged Thomson Reuters\u2019 shareholders to adopt resolutions that would require the company to assess the human rights risks related to the ICE contracts.<\/p>\n Now, ahead of Thomson Reuters\u2019 June 10 annual meeting, BCGEU has again submitted a shareholder proposal<\/a> that would require the company\u2019s board of directors to commission an independent human rights impact assessment (HRIA) of how the company\u2019s products are used by law enforcement and immigration authorities.<\/p>\n Ahead of the meeting, the BCGEU has released a new investor memo<\/a>, dated May 2026 and addressed to institutional investors, laying out its case for why shareholders should vote in favor. The company\u2019s board has recommended a vote against, arguing that its existing human rights due-diligence process already addresses the concerns the union raises.<\/p>\n (For background, see my two-part series on \u201cThe Legal Tech Giants Powering ICE\u201d: Part 1, How Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis Helped Support America\u2019s Immigration Surveillance Machine<\/a>, and Part 2, The Pushback: Employees, Shareholders, Lawyers and the Fight Over May 31<\/a>.)<\/p>\n The BCGEU\u2019s resolution asks the board to commission an independent assessment evaluating the extent to which Thomson Reuters\u2019 products may contribute to adverse human rights impacts when used by law enforcement and immigration agencies \u2013 including, critically, when those products are combined with other surveillance technologies.<\/p>\n The assessment, the proposal says, should address reasonably foreseeable risks arising from the aggregated or integrated use of surveillance tools, recommend measures to mitigate them, and be made public, subject to confidentiality and competitive considerations.<\/p>\n The products at issue are the same ones I detailed in my earlier reporting \u2013 the flagship CLEAR platform and its various law enforcement configurations and license-plate-reader data.<\/p>\n The memo says that there are active contracts potentially worth roughly $60 million as of April 2026 to supply such products to the Department of Homeland Security and ICE.<\/p>\n As I mentioned above, this is not the BCGEU\u2019s first proposal. It previously introduced human rights proposals<\/a> at Thomson Reuters\u2019 annual meetings in 2020 and 2021 asking the company to adopt the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs).<\/p>\n In 2022, the company adopted the UNGPs and committed to conducting human rights impact assessments and disclosing key findings.<\/p>\n In 2025, the union shifted its focus to AI governance, asking the company to extend the UNGP framework to its generative AI products<\/a>. That proposal drew about 20 percent support from independent shareholders \u2013 lower than prior years. The decline was likely attributable to the company having already formally adopted the UNGPs.<\/p>\n This year\u2019s proposal is different again. Rather than asking the company to adopt a framework it has already adopted, it targets what the union argues is a specific gap in how that framework has been applied \u2013 namely the risk created when Thomson Reuters\u2019 data products are integrated into a wider surveillance ecosystem alongside tools from other vendors.<\/p>\n A core argument of the union\u2019s investor memo is that Thomson Reuters\u2019 products are no longer used in isolation but are \u201cwoven into a multi-platform surveillance ecosystem,\u201d and that the compounding human rights risk of that integration has never been independently assessed.<\/p>\n The memo cites government contracting documents and reporting \u2014 including by Oakland Privacy, The New York Times, and the American Dragnet research project \u2014 that it says document how CLEAR can work with Palantir\u2019s analytics platform in a system-to-system configuration.<\/p>\n The memo quotes legal scholar Sarah Lamdan\u2019s description of a contract under which Thomson Reuters provides data and Palantir conducts the real-time analysis to determine targets. It also describes a newer Palantir application, Enhanced Lead Identification and Targeting (ELITE), that the memo says integrates Thomson Reuters data to map targets across geographic areas, and which it says has faced allegations of targeting people without criminal records.<\/p>\n In response to my previous article, Thomson Reuters sent an email stating flatly: \u201cPalantir is not a customer of CLEAR. Our standard terms do not allow the redistribution of CLEAR data to third parties, and, after a contract is ended, they provide that no CLEAR data may be retained by any customer.\u201d It later reiterated this in a blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n But the union is essentially arguing that customer status is not the issue; rather it is that interoperability requirements written into DHS contracts that create the integrated-surveillance risk it wants assessed.<\/p>\n The union\u2019s memo makes parallel arguments about CLEAR\u2019s sourcing of real-time location data from the surveillance vendor PenLink, citing a 2025 SEC privacy impact assessment, and about the 2017 integration of license-plate-recognition data from Vigilant, a Motorola company, into the CLEAR platform.<\/p>\nWhat the Proposal Asks<\/strong><\/h3>\n
A Different Ask Than Before<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The Integration Argument<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The Company\u2019s Position<\/strong><\/h3>\n