Reuters parent has $6.8 million contract with ICE

The parent company of the Reuters news agency has a $6.8 million contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, reported Ben Collins and Meghan Sullivan of NBC News.

Collins and Sullivan reported, “Thomson Reuters Special Services, a subsidiary of the mass-media firm and news agency Thomson Reuters, signed a $6.8 million contract with ICE in March. The company beat out 13 other companies for the bid, including IBM, Booz Allen Hamilton, PricewaterhouseCoopers and LexisNexis.

“The contract stipulates that Thomson Reuters will provide support for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations unit in its ‘mission to locate, arrest and remove criminal aliens that pose a threat to public safety.’

“Thomson Reuters Special Services CEO Steve Rubley is also on the board of the ICE Foundation, a nonprofit that ‘supports the men and women of ICE.’

“A Thomson Reuters spokesperson insisted Reuters’ newsgathering is ‘completely independent of any [of] our commercial relationships.’ The company declined to comment on the Trump administration’s child separation policy.

“‘[Thomson Reuters Special Services] supplies data to ICE in support of its work on active criminal investigations with the explicit purpose to focus resources on priority cases involving threats to public safety and/or national security,’ the company told NBC News in a statement.”

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