Kaarthika Thakker, J.D. Class of 2028
The Department of Homeland Security, which the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) falls under, currently has a contract valued at $22.1M this year with LexisNexis Risk Solutions Inc. and another contract of $22.8M with Thomson Reuters Special Services LLC. These companies fall under the same parent company as legal tools Lexis+ and Westlaw, that we use everyday working and studying in the legal field to conduct research and represent our clients. As Sarah Lamdan lays out in her article in NYU Review of Law & Social Change, a number of “ethical issues arise when lawyers buy and use legal research services sold by the same vendors responsible for building ICE’s surveillance systems” and this can be seen in the overarching question of what is to be done when the money that an attorney and their colleagues pay pads the balance sheets of the same corporation that is the reason a client was detained by ICE when dropping her child off to school?
In this blogpost, I’ll explore what ICE is buying from these companies, the legal issues that arise from them, and some options for resolving this ethical issue.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions + Thomson Reuters: Compiling Data & Enabling Mass Surveillance
Digital data is collected on us basically everywhere, all the time be it the location when we post on Instagram, our search history, employment, our license plates photographed at a light. But these billions of data points aren’t useful until they are compiled in useful ways by “data brokers,” making them searchable and usable. ICE contracts with “data brokers” like LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters to access their dossiers on every consumer in America created from billions of public and non-public records compiled from over 10,000 sources.
What’s in These Records?
In order to better understand what information is in these dossiers, I requested the data Lexis Nexis Risk Solutions electronically, as is my right pursuant to California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (CPRA). A little over two weeks later I received a thick envelope in the mail from Lexis Nexus Risk Solutions which contained ten double sided pages explaining my rights in 10-point font. Half way through the fifth page was a url I nearly missed: https://consumer.risk.lexisnexis.com/files/XXXXXXX where the Xs are a random string of numbers and letters. I typed this into my browser and entered a 7-digit pin of numbers and letters also provided in the letter. It said that my file could not be found. I tried it again, twice more. Then I skimmed the rest of the pages and realized that the data would only be accessible for 30 days. The letter was dated January 13, 2026. It was February 17th. Whatever data they have in my record, LexisNexis made it extremely difficult for me to figure it out. And as a young law student with a computer science degree, good eyesight, and English fluency I have more tools and time to try to access this data than the thousands of others with records likely under ICE surveillance. If even legally trained consumers face obstacles in obtaining their records, this raises important questions about how undocumented individuals can meaningfully challenge the data used to target them.
Data that these brokers compile include everything from addresses to past jobs to social media information. Recent scrutiny has been drawn to both Lexis and Reuters use of license plate readings enabling ICE officers to look for best locations to find a vehicle and set up virtual stakeouts.
Technology enables the mass in mass surveillance. In just seven months of 2021, ICE searched the LexisNexis databases over 1.2M times. In 2022 Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology found that ICE (a) had scanned the driver’s license photos of 1 in 3 adults; (b) had access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults; (c) was tracking the movements of drivers in cities home to 3 in 4 adults; (d) could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records; (e) built its surveillance dragnet by tapping data from private companies and state and local bureaucracies.
ICE is still under the same contract with LexisNexis that they signed in 2021 where this data first emerged. ICE’s contract with LexisNexis uses the word “automate” to describe how they will be using the technology to hunt for suspicious data. The use of the word automate suggests that computers could, and almost certainly, will be making some of the consequential decisions about who to flag for ICE, and there are countless examples of how algorithmic decision making leads to biased outcomes.
Some Potential Legal Issues
Aside from the potential ethical issues that arise from lawyers, especially those representing clients facing deportation, a number of lawyers, researchers, activists, and everyday people have raised concerns on how ICE’s contracts with mass surveillance firms infringe on our rights. (1) Contracting with private sector data brokers allows ICE to purchase data rather than formally request it or seek a court order even when local sanctuary policies prevent this same information from being shared with ICE. (2) Even in jurisdictions where consumers have more rights and protections over their own data, those rights are extremely hard to exercise as evidenced by my difficulty even figuring out which of my data was in Lexis’s database. (3) The rise of mass data-driven surveillance raises legal issues that have been largely unexplored by courts. For example, the argument that selling consumer data is unjust enrichment (where companies get to profit without compensating consumers whose data is harvested.) Or the potential constitutional right violations of the Fourth Amendment, Equal Protection, First Amendment, and Due Process that are explored more in our journal’s recent publication of an article exploring AI’s use in national security profiling.
However, these issues have not yet been addressed by the courts. Ramirez v. LexisNexis Risk Solutions (2024) which alleged violation of Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act, unjust enrichment, and intrusion upon seclusion was dismissed for lack of plaintiff standing.
Building the Mass Deportation Machine, and Its Tools
During Biden’s term and Trump’s previous term, the federal government carried out around one million deportations. President Trump boasts that he has been “shattering” records by deporting 650,000 people in just one year, if we include self-deportations, over 2.5 million people have left the US in just 2025. This is almost triple the deportations of the previous year. His second administration has focused heavily on increasing capacity to deport through ICE, celebrating the expansion of the agency and technology used by the agency as several of his “wins” from the first year.
Deporting hundreds of thousands of people every year would not be possible without technology to be able to track and surveil large amounts of people at once and the tools made by Lexis and Reuters enable this. Scholars and activists have used the phrase “deportation machine” to describe the US’s government’s systematic efforts to expel immigrants over the past 140 years and journalists, activists, and law students use it to bring attention to how Lexis and Reuter’s contracts with ICE further this project.
Solutions Exist; They Are Not Easy
Two main paths exist for our purposes to solve the ethical question for lawyers posed by Lexis and Reuters’ contracts with ICE. First, for Lexis and Reuters to end their contracts with ICE. Second, to move to an alternative. Let’s address these in turn.
Pressuring Westlaw and Lexis+ to End Their Contracts
In 2021, law students at over 20 law schools organized to form the End the Contract Coalition to demand that their universities end their contracts with Westlaw and Lexis as long as they continue their contracts with ICE. Recently, the End the Contracts Coalition hosted a training with Free Law Project that has a suite of free legal research tools as alternatives. However, legal scholars have pointed out that Lexis+ and Westlaw’s duopoly in the legal research space makes it difficult to for law schools to cut their contracts with these companies—no other competitors come close to having similar tools and law students who do not train on these tools will be at a disadvantage in the job market. The cases mentioned above that have tried to make arguments such as unjust enrichment have yet to prevail in court, so civil litigation does not seem like a likely path to hold the corporations accountable.
Pursuing Alternatives
The lack of an alternative legal research platform that is competitive with Westlaw and Lexis+ makes it difficult to opt out of this ethical dilemma. The choice, then, to move to a meaningful alternative would be to build a meaningful alternative—either in the private or public sector. Law schools and law firms could collectively shift to another competitor, like Free Law Project, with the caveat (agreed to in their contract) that they will develop certain features over a certain time frame and that they won’t enter into contracts with ICE or other actors that may pose ethical dilemmas for lawyers. However, it might be difficult to convince a private company to enter into a deal that would result in missing out on potentially multi-million dollar government contracts and a critical mass of employers and schools would have to make the switch to avoid a training gap.
Another alternative could be investing in a public sector legal research database, attempting to scale and provide access on a similar or better level than competitors. The legal profession plays a vital role in the judicial branch of government and proper computer-enabled legal research is necessary to avoid malpractice and fulfill our ethical obligation to provide zealous representation to our clients and avoid conflicts of interest. The ICE contracts with Lexis and Reuters are funded by our tax dollars as well as the contracts at every judge, attorney general, public defender, or any other publicly funded legal office, so building our own database would likely result in both long-term savings and avoids future conflicts of interest as it would owned and financed by those our legal system seeks to serve, the public, rather than some abstract profit-focused, data compromising, institution as Lexis+ and Westlaw appear to be.