The British Columbia General Employees’ Union, which represents greater than 80,000 public employees in Canada’s westernmost province, has used its position as a Thomson Reuters shareholder to push the corporate to analyze the human rights dangers of its tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in contracts with ICE and different authorities companies.
The union has filed three shareholder proposals on the problem since 2020 and was getting ready for additional advocacy when the corporate introduced that it had launched a “review of the human rights impacts of our investigative and research solutions,” firm shareholder paperwork present.
“Tackling human rights risk isn’t just important for protecting shareholder value,” union President Stephanie Smith mentioned in a press release. “Real human beings will be impacted by the results of these audits. … We eagerly await the results of the impact assessment this summer — and expect other data brokers are going to receive similar kinds of pressure from responsible investors in the future. This is just the beginning.”
Thomson Reuters spokeswoman Sarah Schmidt informed The Washington Post on Friday that the corporate is reviewing all of its companies, not simply Clear, as a part of a “human rights salience assessment” launched individually from the union’s work.
The firm “continues to be engaged by DHS-ICE to support the agency’s criminal investigations and priority cases such as those involving threats to national security and/or public safety,” Schmidt mentioned. “Thomson Reuters takes its role as a responsible corporate citizen seriously and has long believed that all companies should consider potential human rights risks related to their operations.”
A spokesperson for the union, when supplied the corporate’s response, informed The Post that the union was “ensured” that the investigation would come with ICE contracts.
And Smith mentioned in a press release: “Thomson Reuters drawing conclusions about these contracts before the human rights impact assessment has been completed undermines our confidence in the process, and makes it seem prejudged. If this is just a check-the-box exercise on the part of Thomson Reuters, clearly our work is not over. We will continue our investor engagement efforts until Thomson Reuters shows a real commitment to adequately assess and mitigate human rights risk.”
ICE officers didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark. Agency officers have mentioned the database has been used to examine critical crimes however have supplied few particulars on how broadly it’s used, citing confidentiality guidelines round instruments and strategies.
The firm has mentioned its databases are utilized by approved police, authorities and company companies to “catch bad actors, keep communities safe and investigate crimes, such as money laundering, human trafficking, and drug and weapons smuggling.”
The union has cited civil rights activists’ considerations that Clear had helped ICE detain immigrants and separate households not accused of any crime. About 20 p.c of all firm shareholders, together with 70 p.c of all unbiased shareholders, voted in help of a proposal urging a human rights review final summer season.
The Post first reported final yr that ICE officers had used Clear’s water, energy and residential utility data whereas pursuing immigration circumstances. A nationwide utility group agreed to cease providing the data to Clear in December.
Some lawmakers have additionally argued that Clear is one other instance of police and authorities companies shopping for delicate data on non-public residents they’d not in any other case have the authority to gather on their very own. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) launched a invoice final yr, the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act, that might drastically prohibit the apply.
Clear continues to have contracts with authorities companies, although ICE’s contract for the service ended final yr. ICE has as an alternative purchased entry to private information on Americans from different data brokers, together with Equifax and LexisNexis, main advocates to accuse the company of violating “sanctuary city” insurance policies designed to restrict the information that police in some areas can share with federal immigration authorities.
The Thomson Reuters announcement was heralded as a optimistic step by the organizers of No Tech for ICE, a protest motion that has pushed tech firms to cease serving to an company it has criticized for raiding, surveilling and deporting immigrants.
Jacinta González, a senior marketing campaign director on the Latino civil rights group Mijente, mentioned in a press release, “Our undocumented community members deserve the right to feel safe and should not have to fear that their data will be shared to harm them based on their immigration status.”
The British Columbia union has argued that Thomson Reuters’s data work not solely threatens to hurt the union’s funding however poses moral considerations for society at massive. The union’s leaders mentioned in 2020 that “an ethical, activist approach to investing provides superior results over the long-term from a financial and a social justice perspective.”