“No one signing up for a credit card thinks they’re giving data brokers a thumbs-up to sell their personal information to ICE. Not only is it an outrageous violation of our privacy, it’s impossible for Americans to opt out,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media.
The practical effect is that an address update can land in an enforcement database within a day, with no notice or consent. ICE has already paid over $54 million for CLEAR access, and the new contract locks in expanded capabilities for up to five years. The Department of Homeland Security has stated that Thomson Reuters Special Services is “the only contractor” able to provide continuous monitoring of up to one million individuals and entities, with real-time alerts and model-based risk scoring.
The data does not sit idle. ICE uses Palantir’s ELITE raid-planning tool, which relies on CLEAR data to calculate address “confidence scores” that help prioritize enforcement targets. Yet the underlying information is not always reliable. A Thomson Reuters employee told 404 Media that combining disparate sources is “fundamentally a difficult problem,” and people can be incorrectly linked to relatives’ addresses or outdated locations.