A UK-based data broker and information services provider. Its subsidiary LexisNexis provides US immigration authorities with systems used to track and target immigrant communities and sells legal databases to prisons and jails.
RELX Group (formerly Reed Elsevier) is a U.K.-based data broker and information services provider headquartered in London. The company sells subscription-based information, publishing services, and software to the legal, scientific, technical, medical, and risk management sectors. It is owned by RELX PLC, a holding company traded on the Amsterdam, London, and New York stock exchanges.
RELX subsidiary LexisNexis is a data broker and legal research provider headquartered in New York. Through various RELX subsidiaries, LexisNexis provides personal data products to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Between 2005 and 2024, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded RELX and its subsidiaries over $172 million in contracts.
In addition to providing personal data products to U.S. immigration authorities, LexisNexis sells legal research databases to prisons and jails, including immigration jails, across the U.S. The company sells these products through joint ventures with kiosk, tablet, “inmate phone service,” video “visitation,” and other prison communications vendors.
Immigrant Surveillance in the US
LEIDS and Accurint
LexisNexis contracts with CBP and ICE for the agencies’ Law Enforcement Investigative Database Subscription (LEIDS) program, a web-based investigative database platform that is used to conduct “criminal investigations…against terrorists and criminal organizations.” LEIDS integrates access to public records and commercial data with various “investigative capabilities,” including license plate recognition.
Under contracts worth a potential $15.9 million and $22.1 million, LexisNexis subsidiaries will provide CBP and ICE with the LEIDS platform until potentially 2027 and 2026, respectively. Over 11,000 ICE agents were using LEIDS as of 2021.
ICE’s LEIDS platform is used for “the full spectrum of its immigration enforcement.” The system allows the agency to conduct rapid “data extractions to identify unusual trends”; detect, monitor, analyze, and map “patterns of relationships” between individuals; identify “potentially criminal and fraudulent behavior before crime and fraud can materialize”; and detect “crimes involving the exploitation or attempts to exploit the immigration and customs laws” of the U.S. In other words, ICE uses this program as a tool of mass surveillance and [predictive] policing, namely to monitor the “personal lives and mundane movements” of immigrants and to “strategize arrests,” workplace raids, and deportations.
The LEIDS program includes access to Accurint, a LexisNexis tool that provides immigration authorities with access to Justice Intelligence (formerly JusticeXchange). Justice Intelligence is a product of Equifax subsidiary Appriss Insights. The database collects, and makes easily searchable, real-time incarceration release data from thousands of U.S. jails and prisons. ICE uses this information to learn the release dates of individuals it targets for deportation. The agency has access to this database as an add-on to its LexisNexis Accurint subscription.
ICE has used Justice Intelligence to circumvent state and local sanctuary policies that prevent local law enforcement from cooperating with the agency. In its justification for its contract for the database, ICE noted that “policy or legislative changes” have caused “an increase in the number of law enforcement agencies and state or local governments that do not share information about real time incarceration of foreign-born nationals with ICE. Therefore, it is critical to have access to Justice Intelligence services through LexisNexis' Appriss Insights.” In other words, through its privatization of data sharing, LexisNexis provides ICE with backdoor access to data that continues to enable its targeting of immigrants.
Other clients of the Justice Intelligence database include some of DHS’s fusion centers. These centers share local law enforcement data with DHS, which includes ICE, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and other agencies. LexisNexis Special Services operates the Public Safety Data Exchange, which compiles data from thousands of law enforcement agencies for information sharing purposes. LexisNexis requires its law enforcement customers to provide their data for incorporation into its database.
LexisNexis’s contracts with ICE have been the subject of various investigations and lawsuits, despite the company’s attempts to keep such operations out of public view. (LexisNexis has, for example, stipulated in contracts with ICE that it not be named in any of the agency’s press releases, advertisements, or marketing materials.) In 2022, a group of immigrant rights organizations led by Just Futures Law sued the company for allegedly selling individuals’ “sensitive personal data,” without their consent, to corporations, law enforcement agencies (including ICE), and government entities. According to the lawsuit, LexisNexis collects and sells consumers’ data through its Accurint platform, providing its clients with millions of individual profiles that contain “almost every aspect of consumers’ lives.” In May 2024, the organizations dropped their lawsuit, potentially signaling that a settlement has been reached.
Other Data and Services
LexisNexis’s data products are used by ICE agents and private contractors at the National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center (NCATC). The NCATC serves as the “national enforcement operations center” for all 25 of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) field offices and headquarters. Based at the Law Enforcement Support Center (LESC) in Williston, Vt., the intelligence center has been described as the “nerve center for ICE operations.”
The Center shares immigration status information with state and local law enforcement across the U.S. and coordinates fingerprint matching between local law enforcement agencies and ICE. NCATC processes vast amounts of personal data, and, in the second quarter of 2022 alone, vetted over 2.3 million individuals for immigration enforcement.
NCATC generates target lists to assist ICE agents with tracking down immigrants convicted of crimes, but its mission also includes targeting anyone “unlawfully present in the United States.” ICE sends datasets of deported individuals to the NCATC, which are run through the agency’s Data Analysis System in order to determine whether someone has reentered the U.S.
This system pulls data from other federal agencies and commercial data brokers, including LexisNexis, to match names of deported individuals to DMV and criminal records, mailing addresses, social media accounts, and other personal data. After receiving a “location lead,” ICE agents coordinate arrests and deportations.
LexisNexis data is also integrated into CBP’s Automated Targeting System (ATS), a tool “that compares traveler, cargo, and conveyance information against law enforcement, intelligence, and other enforcement data.” The ATS runs agents’ queries against a broader platform called TECS (used for “border screening” and law enforcement “lookouts”).
Prison and Immigration Jail Law Libraries
Through joint ventures with prison communications vendors, LexisNexis sells electronic legal databases to prisons and jails, including immigration jails. The company’s digital law libraries, which consist of court cases and other legal content, are made available to incarcerated and detained individuals via kiosk, tablet, or PC. As of 2024, LexisNexis claims to be the “leading provider of correctional law libraries in the [country].”
LexisNexis has provided digital law libraries to thousands of prisons and jails, including immigration jails, across the U.S. For example, under a contract worth a potential $3 million with ICE, the company will provide access to its electronic prison law libraries to various immigration jails at least through 2027. It has also provided its “inmate law library solutions” to prisons and jails in Alaska, California, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Virginia, and Washington.
LexisNexis markets its digital prison law library databases as tools for “improv[ing] legal access for inmates.” This technology, however, has been widely criticized for limiting incarcerated individuals’ access to effective legal aid. Prison law libraries’ adoption of LexisNexis, WestLaw, and other legal research databases has effectively replaced on-site legal aid programs through which trained lawyers and paralegals assist incarcerated individuals with legal research questions and court processes. In 2017, for example, South Dakota’s state prison department eliminated one of the U.S.’s last on-site prison legal assistance programs and replaced it with LexisNexis’s legal search engine.
LexisNexis’s databases have also replaced law libraries’ print materials and books, offering only a “narrowing of what’s available.” For those who face language, literacy, or other barriers, LexisNexis’s “do-it-yourself” legal research approach is inaccessible. In one such case, a county jail in Missouri that had only one LexisNexis-equipped computer failed to renew the company’s software for approximately two years, thereby prohibiting incarcerated individuals from accessing legal materials and impairing their preparation of case documents.