Journalists push back against parent companies' ICE contracts
U.S. Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino walks through a Target store Jan. 11, 2026, in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Photo by Adam Gray/The Associated Press)
More than 200 journalists at Law360 and its sister publications have signed a letter demanding the end of a $22.1 million, five-year contract that parent company RELX has with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that grants access to a database of public records compiled by its LexisNexis Risk Solutions, according to Poynter.
“We are deeply concerned that RELX is directly aiding the separation of families, the removal of children from schools and the death of individuals in detention centers,” according to the letter sent by unionized Law360 journalists and posted on X, formerly Twitter. “LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ database gives ICE the ability to find migrants where they work and identify their family members, according to privacy and legal experts’ analysis of contract documents.”
Also, several journalists at Reuters signed an internal letter to parent company Thomson Reuters, asking the corporation to explain “what human rights and civil liberties due diligence” that it conducted when signing several contracts totally “tens of millions of dollars” with the DHS, according to the story.
Both corporations “generate billions of dollars of revenue,” partly from their information and analytics tools, while the news organizations generation “a comparatively small portion of their business,” according to the story.
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