ICE Posts Notice to Sole-Source $125M Data Contract to Thomson Reuters Special Services, Drops the Sole-Source Plan, Then Awards It After One Offer

ICE posted a notice on SAM.gov in July that it intended to sole-source its Data Analytic Support Services effort to Thomson Reuters Special Services, the Thomson Reuters unit that sells the CLEAR people-search database, “in accordance with the approved Justification and Approval which is attached to this announcement.” The planned deal was a five-year, $125 million agreement. The justification, as quoted by Democracy Docket from the order that 404 Media first made public, said the data was needed “to support the presidential mandate of the identification of Voters Fraud, Immigration Fraud and National Security.” Those are ICE’s words, attributed to ICE and not adopted here.

Source caveat on that quote. ICE deleted the justification PDF from SAM.gov when it withdrew the sole-source plan, and the SAM.gov API now answers that the file has been deleted. The DocumentCloud copy 404 Media posted was behind a Cloudflare block for this check. The “Voters Fraud” wording is therefore verified here only as Democracy Docket quotes it, not read from the document. The notice, the withdrawal and the award come from SAM.gov and USAspending records directly.

The sequence. ICE then updated the notice on August 12 to say that “the Government no longer intends to sole source this requirement,” citing industry feedback and naming no respondents. Biometric Update, which saw the justification before it was removed, reports that it described access to TRSS data through “another company serving as prime contractor”; the document did not name that company, and no prime has been identified. The blanket purchase agreement, 70CMSD26A00000008, was signed in September against TRSS’s GSA schedule contract, with a $125 million ceiling running through September 29, 2031. Biometric Update reports that TRSS was “the only company to submit an offer.” USAspending codes the competition as “FULL AND OPEN COMPETITION,” so “competed” here describes the process, not the result: one bidder, the vendor ICE had first proposed to sole-source.

What the ceiling is. The $125 million is a ceiling, and the agreement itself carries $0 in obligations; orders placed under it carry the money, and their totals are in the working notes.

Context. Thomson Reuters told 404 Media that “Immigration status is not a search field in CLEAR,” which answers a different question from whether cross-checking voter records is a use. The same agency’s Homeland Security Investigations arm separately asked a contractor for voter registration files (2026-08-26–hsi-solicits-private-contractor-voter-registration-files-fraud-detection), and the geolocation purchases from Thomson Reuters are the subject of a Maryland complaint (2026-08-20–maryland-ag-complaint-penlink-thomson-reuters-geolocation-ice).