During Billie Little's roughly two decades working at Thomson Reuters, she felt pride in the company, which is known for its legal database Westlaw, its media company Reuters, and its role as a major data broker.
But as masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swarmed Minneapolis early this year and the country reeled from federal agents fatally shooting Renée Macklin Good and Alex Pretti, Little and other colleagues grew alarmed that ICE agents could be abusing Thomson Reuters investigative tools that provide vast quantities of personal data on people including license plate information.
Little, who worked in legal publishing, was part of a committee of employees that sent a letter to company management in February flagging that ICE could be using Thomson Reuters products unlawfully and asking for greater transparency about the company's oversight of its contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. Soon after their effort was made public in the media, however, Little was fired from her role.
"Instead of addressing our concerns, our legitimate concerns – instead, they turn toward investigating me," Little told NPR. "And I was instrumental in leading the group. So I think that clearly they were trying to chill [the] activity of workers and that should scare every worker across the country."
Little is now suing the company, arguing that her dismissal violated a law in her home state of Oregon that bars employers from firing whistleblowers.
An unnamed Thomson Reuters spokesperson told NPR it would be inappropriate to comment on an individual employment matter but said of the lawsuit, "We strongly dispute the allegations and intend to robustly defend the case."
Thomson Reuters, which is headquartered in Toronto, is also facing pressure from shareholders over its ICE contracts.
British Columbia General Employees' Union, a public sector union that holds shares in the company, filed a proposal to commission an independent evaluation of the extent to which the company's products "may contribute to adverse human rights impacts" when used by law enforcement agencies and immigration authorities.
Thomson Reuters contracts with ICE
In late January, Little was closely following news reports about U.S. citizens detained by ICE and heightened tensions in Minneapolis in the aftermath of shootings that killed Good and Pretti. She was also worried about what she heard from colleagues that work out of the Thomson Reuters office in the Twin Cities suburb of Eagan.
"People afraid to go to work, people afraid to take their kids to school, people being followed and all of that," Little recalled.
So when a colleague shared a post on an internal employee chat that claimed Thomson Reuters was a top corporate collaborator with ICE, Little said she felt "sick to my stomach."
"After that post, everybody was kind of like, 'What?' There was a lot of confusion and anger, concern," Little told NPR. But she said management turned off the comments on the post.
Not all employees had been aware that Thomson Reuters has held tens of millions of dollars in contracts with ICE in the last several years for its data and investigative tools.
One of the key products Thomson Reuters sells to law enforcement agencies, including ICE, is called CLEAR, which aggregates billions of data points on individuals from public and proprietary records, as well as social media. CLEAR's platform also includes images from a network of license plate readers. ICE has a nearly $5 million contract with Thomson Reuters from May 2025 for "license plate reader data to enhance investigations for potential arrest, seizure and forfeiture."
Little's own work at the company had nothing to do with CLEAR. But she had heard over the years that it was being used to go after human traffickers or child exploitation crimes.
"So that was all to the good. And I could feel good about that," Little said. But she began to grow concerned that the tool was potentially being used far more widely than that by ICE to identify immigrants and protesters without criminal histories.
In an email to NPR, Thomson Reuters said its tools "support investigations into areas of national security and public safety, such as child exploitation, human trafficking, narcotics and weapons trafficking and financial crime."
The statement continued, "We remain committed to this mission while maintaining strong safeguards that ensure our products and services are used in accordance with our contractual terms and applicable law."
The company has previously asserted that CLEAR was not intended to be used to help deport undocumented immigrants with no criminal records.
A Thomson Reuters description of CLEAR that no longer appears on the company's website but was archived by the WayBack Machine says it is "not designed for use for mass illegal immigration inquiries or for deporting non-criminal undocumented persons and non-citizens."
Company documents from as recently as February that outline the terms for using CLEAR say that vehicle registration data shouldn't be used for immigration enforcement.
But as news stories showed dramatic increases in the number of immigrants arrested without any criminal history, Little said she began to doubt the company's line.
And protesters in Minneapolis began describing that ICE agents knew their names and home addresses, seemingly from looking up their vehicle registration information from their license plates.
Little and other colleagues worried Thomson Reuters tools were possibly being used unlawfully in Minnesota, including potentially against the company's own employees there.
She and other employees formed a group they called the "Committee to Restore Trust," which sent a letter to management on Feb. 20 that was signed by about 170 employees. Some 27,000 people work for the company globally.
"We are troubled by the possibility that [Thomson Reuters] products may enable activities that violate constitutional protections – including Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, Fifth Amendment due process rights, and Fourteenth Amendment equal protection guarantees," reads a portion of the letter that Little then included in her lawsuit. "Thomson Reuters products may be used in ways that conflict with state and local laws in sanctuary jurisdictions, as well as data protection and privacy regulations at multiple governmental levels."
The letter asked for an all hands meeting to discuss the company's oversight of its ICE contracts.
"They called us brave for bringing it up to their attention," Little recalled. But she said nothing else happened, and the committee members felt "stonewalled."
Thomson Reuters did not respond to specific questions about its interactions with employees, but told NPR, "We take employee concerns seriously and provide clear channels for colleagues to raise issues, as outlined in our Code of Conduct."
The company's statement also read, "We take seriously the legality and legitimacy of our products."
Both the Minnesota Star Tribune and The New York Times wrote about the employees' concerns in March.
Five days after the Times article was published, Little was summoned to a meeting with HR where she was told she was being investigated for violating confidentiality and data sharing policies, according to her lawsuit. A few days later she was fired. The lawsuit says she was told she violated the company's code of conduct but she did not receive written findings from an investigation or an explanation of which provision the company alleges she violated.
Little's lawsuit also says she had never previously received a negative review or been subject to discipline. The suit seeks to reverse her termination, as well as award her lost wages and compensatory damages.
"My client reported conduct that she reasonably believed was unlawful and she was fired for it, and that is expressly prohibited here in Oregon," said Maria Witt, one of the attorneys representing Little in her lawsuit.
One former Thomson Reuters employee told NPR they voluntarily left the company over dissatisfaction over how the company responded to employee concerns over potential misuse of the company's tools by ICE in the Twin Cities where many employees live. They asked NPR not to use their name because they fear retaliation from Thomson Reuters.
"I feel like the company's response in terms of supporting its employees and supporting justice has strayed so far from the path," the former employee told NPR. "It seems like they are profiting off their own employees being terrorized at this point, which is upsetting and makes me sad."
Concerns from advocates and shareholders
Privacy and civil liberties advocates have long been worried about the government's ability to purchase detailed data on individuals from data brokers like Thomson Reuters without stronger guardrails.
"Right now, there are few legal safeguards in place preventing [Thomson Reuters] from selling tons of data to whoever it wants or preventing TR's customers from using the data however they want," Sarah Lamdan, a privacy researcher and author of the book "Data Cartels," wrote in an email to NPR.
The company asserts the type of records it provides its customers does not include the kind of information that law enforcement would traditionally need a warrant to obtain. But privacy advocates have argued that aggregation of so much data in one place provides details law enforcement would not be able to obtain otherwise unless they had a warrant.
"If you consolidate enough data about a person, you can infer all sorts of very personal information about them that would require a warrant to obtain through normal intelligence, investigation, and interrogation practices," Lamdan wrote to NPR.
Furthermore, reporting by technology outlet 404 Media has found that CLEAR is being integrated into other Palantir and Motorola tools used by ICE.
Activists who observe and record federal immigration enforcement operations have filed lawsuits alleging that federal agents have violated their First Amendment rights, including by attempting to intimidate them by taking down their license plate information or using it to identify them.
Emma Pullman, the head of shareholder engagement at the British Columbia General Employees' Union, told NPR that her union has been engaging with Thomson Reuters about its ICE contracts since 2020.
"The questions that Billy Little was asking of her employer weren't all that different from the questions that we, as a long term shareholder, have been asking of her employer," Pullman told NPR.
She said the issue has become even more urgent as there are allegations of ICE agents violating peoples' rights, which she said has changed the investment risk profile for Thomson Reuters and warrants "renewed scrutiny, more due diligence and more disclosure."
Thomson Reuters' board of directors has come out in opposition to the shareholder proposal.
The unnamed spokesperson told NPR in a statement that such an assessment would be "duplicative and an inefficient use of resources" because an independent consultancy completed the company's second human rights impact assessment in 2025 and the company plans to publish key findings on its website later this year.
But Pullman said that 2025 assessment was completed before ICE's escalation in Minnesota in early 2026 and before employees at the company raised concerns. Furthermore, she said her union was dissatisfied with the level of information the company disclosed in 2022 when it did its first human rights impact assessment. "This isn't duplicative," Pullman said of her union's shareholder proposal. "This is due diligence."
As for Billie Little, she told NPR that anyone would be intimidated to take on such a big company. But she said she feels a moral and ethical obligation to bring her lawsuit, and that it is bigger than what happened to her individually.
"This is about the issues of protecting our privacy, our law enforcement agencies abiding by the Constitution and protecting our civil liberties," she said.
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