During Billie Little’s nearly 20 years at Thomson Reuters, she valued the company’s legal research tools, news wing and data services. But early this year, as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement intensified operations in Minneapolis and the nation reacted to the fatal shootings of Renée Macklin Good and Alex Pretti, Little and colleagues grew alarmed that ICE might be using Thomson Reuters’ investigative products in ways that targeted immigrants and protesters.
Little worked in legal publishing and did not handle the company’s investigative platform CLEAR, but she learned that Thomson Reuters sells CLEAR — which aggregates billions of public and proprietary records, social media and data from a network of license plate readers — to law enforcement. ICE had a nearly $5 million contract from May 2025 for license plate reader data to “enhance investigations for potential arrest, seizure and forfeiture.” Reports and local accounts suggested agents were using data, including license-plate-derived vehicle registration information, to identify people — sometimes people without criminal histories — and even to locate protesters and employees in the Twin Cities.
Concerned about possible unlawful uses, Little joined a group of employees called the “Committee to Restore Trust.” On Feb. 20 the committee sent management a letter, signed by about 170 employees at a company with roughly 27,000 workers worldwide, asking for transparency and for the company to explain oversight of its contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. The letter warned that Thomson Reuters products could be used in ways that raise constitutional and legal issues in sanctuary jurisdictions and under data protection rules.
Little says management shut off comments on an internal post about the issue and largely stonewalled the committee. Media coverage followed: the Minnesota Star Tribune and The New York Times reported on employee concerns in March. Five days after the Times story, Little says she was called into an HR meeting and told she was being investigated for violating confidentiality and data-sharing policies; a few days later she was fired. Her lawsuit alleges she was dismissed in retaliation for raising what she reasonably believed were unlawful practices, which Oregon law forbids. The suit seeks reinstatement, lost wages and compensatory damages; it also says Little received no written findings from any investigation or explanation of the specific code-of-conduct violation.
Thomson Reuters declined to comment on an individual employment matter and said it “strongly dispute[s] the allegations and intend[s] to robustly defend the case.” The company has told NPR and others that its tools support investigations into national security and public safety crimes such as child exploitation, human trafficking, narcotics and financial crime, and that it maintains safeguards to ensure products are used in accordance with contracts and the law. The company previously stated CLEAR is not intended for mass immigration inquiries or deporting noncriminal undocumented people; company terms have said vehicle registration data shouldn’t be used for immigration enforcement.
Privacy and civil liberties advocates question whether those safeguards are sufficient. Researchers note that aggregating large amounts of data can reveal personal information law enforcement would traditionally need a warrant to obtain. Technology reporting has found CLEAR integrated with other tools used by ICE, including systems from Palantir and Motorola, potentially broadening how data flows into enforcement operations.
Shareholders and activists have also pressed Thomson Reuters. The British Columbia General Employees’ Union, a public-sector union and shareholder, filed a proposal calling for an independent evaluation of whether the company’s products may contribute to adverse human rights impacts when used by law enforcement and immigration authorities. Union officials say they have engaged the company on ICE contracts since 2020 and argue the escalation in Minnesota in early 2026 and recent employee complaints change the investment risk profile and warrant renewed scrutiny and more disclosure. Thomson Reuters’ board opposes the proposal, saying an independent consultancy completed the company’s second human rights impact assessment in 2025 and key findings will be published later this year; the union counters that assessment predated the 2026 actions and employee concerns.
Some former and current employees described fear and frustration in the Twin Cities office, saying coworkers reported being followed, afraid to take their children to school, or fearful at work. One former employee said they left because of dissatisfaction with how the company responded and asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. Activists who monitor immigration enforcement have filed lawsuits alleging federal agents violated First Amendment rights by recording or using observers’ license-plate information to intimidate them.
Little says her lawsuit is about more than her own firing. She frames it as a fight over privacy, civil liberties and whether companies that sell powerful aggregated data should ensure it is not used to violate constitutional protections. “This is about the issues of protecting our privacy, our law enforcement agencies abiding by the Constitution and protecting our civil liberties,” she told NPR.
