Thomson Reuters — the company behind the Westlaw legal database and Reuters news wire — has been quietly selling data to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for years. One of its key products, called CLEAR, aggregates billions of data points on individuals: home addresses, license plate information, social media activity, and more. ICE has a nearly $5 million contract with Thomson Reuters for license plate reader data alone, explicitly to enhance arrest operations.

As ICE agents swarmed Minneapolis earlier this year — detaining people with no criminal history and tracking protesters by their vehicle registration — Thomson Reuters employees grew alarmed that their company's tools were being used far beyond their stated purpose. About 170 employees signed a letter to management in February asking for transparency and an all-hands meeting to discuss the company's oversight of its ICE contracts. Thomson Reuters stonewalled them.

Then it got worse. Billie Little, a nearly two-decade employee who helped lead that effort, was fired days after the story went public in the press. She had never received a negative performance review. She was told she violated a company code of conduct policy — but was never given written findings or told which provision she allegedly broke. She is now suing Thomson Reuters for wrongful termination under Oregon's whistleblower protection law.

Thomson Reuters has said its tools are "not designed for use for mass illegal immigration inquiries or for deporting non-criminal undocumented persons." But reports show CLEAR is being integrated into surveillance platforms used by ICE, and protesters in Minneapolis described agents using license plate data to identify them by name and home address. The company's own contract terms say vehicle registration data shouldn't be used for immigration enforcement — raising serious questions about whether Thomson Reuters is monitoring how its tools are actually being used, or simply looking the other way.

Privacy and civil liberties experts warn that aggregating enough data on a person — even from public records — allows law enforcement to build profiles that would otherwise require a warrant. What Thomson Reuters is selling to ICE is not just data. It may be a surveillance system with few meaningful guardrails.

We are calling on Thomson Reuters to immediately suspend its data contracts with ICE pending an independent human rights audit, to publicly disclose how its tools are being used by law enforcement and immigration agencies, and to reinstate Billie Little. Firing a long-tenured employee for raising legitimate legal and ethical concerns is not accountability — it's intimidation. And it sends a chilling message to every worker who might dare speak up.

Employees who report potential wrongdoing deserve protection, not termination. Thomson Reuters employees, shareholders, and the public deserve answers.

Sign this petition to demand Thomson Reuters stop selling surveillance data to ICE, come clean about how its tools are being used, and make right what it did to Billie Little.