Thomson Reuters Employee Fired After Raising Concerns About Company's ICE Data Contracts

NPR published an investigation on April 21, 2026 reporting that Billie Little, a nearly two-decade veteran at Thomson Reuters' Eagan, Minnesota office, was fired after she and colleagues raised concerns about the company's contracts to supply data to ICE. As masked ICE agents swarmed Minneapolis during the January 2026 Operation Metro Surge — which resulted in the fatal shooting of Renée Macklin Good and Alex Pretti — Little and coworkers grew alarmed that ICE agents were abusing Thomson Reuters' CLEAR investigative database, which provides names, addresses, Social Security numbers, car registration data, and ethnic background data. Thomson Reuters holds a nearly $5 million contract from May 2025 with ICE for 'license plate reader data to enhance investigations for potential arrest, seizure and forfeiture.' An employee committee sent a letter to management in February 2026 asking for transparency about DHS/ICE oversight; shortly after the effort became public, Little was fired. Thomson Reuters is also facing shareholder pressure: British Columbia's public employees' union, a shareholder, filed a proposal requiring an independent human rights impact evaluation of its products used by law enforcement. The Minnesota Star Tribune had previously reported that Thomson Reuters employs thousands at its Eagan campus near the sites of the Minneapolis enforcement surge.