{"id":113747,"date":"2018-07-02T12:00:45","date_gmt":"2018-07-02T11:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=113747"},"modified":"2018-07-09T11:48:56","modified_gmt":"2018-07-09T10:48:56","slug":"thomson-reuters-defends-its-work-for-ice-providing-identification-and-location-of-aliens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/07\/thomson-reuters-defends-its-work-for-ice-providing-identification-and-location-of-aliens\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomson Reuters Defends Its Work for ICE, Providing \u201cIdentification and Location of Aliens\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Thomson Reuters office building is seen in Gdynia, Poland, on Nov. 15, 2017.
Photo: Michal Fludra\/NurPhoto\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

27 Jun 2018 – <\/em>The reporters at Reuters have been providing crucial, unfliching coverage<\/a> of the cruel treatment of would-be immigrants under policies pushed by President Donald Trump.\u00a0Meanwhile,\u00a0the news agency\u2019s\u00a0parent company, Thomson Reuters, has been supplying U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement with data from its vast stores as part of federal contracts worth close to $30 million.\u00a0A letter from a Thomson Reuters executive shows that the company is ready to defend at least one of those contracts while remaining silent on the rest.<\/p>\n

Last week, advocacy and watchdog group Privacy International wrote to Thomson Reuters CEO James Smith<\/a> to \u201cexpress concern\u201d over contracts between ICE and two of the company\u2019s subsidiaries. Thomson Reuters Special Services sells ICE \u201ca continuous monitoring and alert service that provides real-time jail booking data to support the identification and location of aliens\u201d as part of a $6.7 million contract, and West Publishing, another subsidiary, provides ICE\u2019s \u201cDetention Compliance and Removals\u201d office with access to a vast license-plate scanning database<\/a>, along with agency access to\u00a0the Consolidated Lead Evaluation and Reporting, or CLEAR, system<\/a>, which Thomson Reuters advertises as holding a \u201cvast collection of public and proprietary records.\u201d The two West contracts are together worth $26 million.<\/p>\n

The Privacy International letter cites the practice by U.S. authorities of separating children from their parents, as well as the Trump administration\u2019s overall \u201czero tolerance\u201d approach to immigration violations. The children \u2014 thousands of them \u2014 are typically intercepted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection with their parents; the parents are then detained by ICE while the children, having been forcibly separated, are held in conditions that some have described in horrifying terms, under the supervision of Health and Human Services. (ICE agents have also been accused of sexual abusing<\/a> hundreds of detainees, underhanded arrest tactics<\/a>, and more.)<\/p>\n

Privacy International\u2019s letter requested that Thomson Reuters \u201ccommit to not providing products or services to U.S. immigration agencies which may be used to enforce such cruel, arbitrary, and disproportionate measures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read Our Complete Coverage -The War on Immigrants<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So far, the only response has come from Thomson Reuters Special Services CEO Stephen Rubley, who, in a letter passed on to The Intercept, replied that\u00a0his parent company \u201cprovides products and services to many parts of the U.S. government in support of the rule of law,\u201d and pointed Privacy International to the corporation\u2019s \u201cTrust Principles,\u201d<\/a> which make no mention of the acceptability or unacceptability of\u00a0providing data services\u00a0to the agency \u2014 though Trust Principle No. 5 does state, tellingly, that \u201cno effort shall be spared to expand, develop, and adapt the news and other services and products so as to maintain its leading position in the international news and information business.\u201d<\/p>\n

NBC News previously reported that Rubley<\/a>\u00a0is \u201con the board of the ICE Foundation, a nonprofit that \u2018supports the men and women of ICE.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Rubley\u2019s response continues by stating that TRSS does not provide data directly to those who are responsible for the separating children from their parents:<\/p>\n

In the case of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, we have considered who in that organization should be granted access to our products and for what specific purposes. Thomson Reuters Special Services provides the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency with products that support active investigations and priority cases involving threats to public safety and\/or national security.<\/em><\/p>\n

Our products are not used by the Border Patrol Division for purposes of patrolling the border for undocumented immigrants or their detainment.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rubley also claimed that every TRSS \u201ccustomer must certify its specific legally permissible uses prior to being granted access to any data,\u201d and that \u201cwe take our role as a good corporate citizen extremely seriously, and we have well-documented evidence of the positive role our data systems can make to a society.\u201d This defense, even if accurate, completely elides any criticism of ICE on the basis of general inhumanity, as opposed to illegality.<\/p>\n

In a new second letter to Reuters\u2019s CEO provided to The Intercept, Privacy International makes clear that the response from the company so far \u201cdoes not address any of our specific questions,\u201d and that Privacy International is \u201cdisappointed to have so far not received a response from West Publishing Corporation, or from Thomson Reuters itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

In response to a request for more information about Thomson Reuters\u2019 overall corporate relationship with ICE and West Publishing\u2019s work for the agency specifically, a company spokesperson replied saying only that\u00a0Thomson Reuters Special Services\u00a0\u201cproducts are not used by the Border Patrol Division for purposes of patrolling the border for undocumented immigrants or their detainment,\u201d again making no mention of West Publishing. The spokesperson declined to comment on whether Thomson Reuters would pursue further business with an agency involved in separating children from their parents.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Sam Biddle<\/a> – sam.biddle@\u200btheintercept.com<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

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Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

27 Jun 2018 – The company is under pressure from Privacy International for its nearly $30 million in ICE contracts via two subsidiaries. The spokesperson declined to comment on whether Thomson Reuters would pursue further business with an agency involved in separating children from their parents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":113748,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}