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Thomson Reuters Is Profiting Off of ICE’S Reign of Terror

And they’re trying to silence whistleblowers.

Billie Little was raised in Ohio in a household of four siblings and, in the course of her childhood, 22 foster children. Her parents had a strong sense of civic duty. Hers was a religious family; they went to church three times a week. She was 7 when her father, spotting a KKK meeting in town, gathered a group to run the hooded men off. At 15, she did missionary work in Harlan County, handing out clothes and canned food. At 18, she became an itinerant laborer, waiting tables, pumping gas, painting houses, and picking apples across the West. “I worked alongside many immigrants and saw how hard they work. I respected them a lot. There was nothing but kindness.”

Along the way, she joined a commune, married, and got a college degree. She endured domestic violence, raised two children while putting herself through law school. She worked in legal publishing for 21 years at Thomson, later Thomson Reuters. In September 2025, Billie became a senior legal editor at the company. “I finally got the promotion I’d dreamed of. Finally. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to worry about money. I started thinking about buying a house.”

In 2007, Thomson, known for its legal publications, purchased Reuters, the venerable international reporting service. The company grew into a giant data broker and media conglomerate that, besides running Reuters, sells massive quantities of personal data to private industry and government agencies.

Thomson Reuters (TR) is based in Toronto, Canada. One of its US offices, home to more than 3,600 employees, is in Eagan, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis.

In 2017, TR completed a $22 million sale that provided the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm (ICE) with a range of government and public data through its investigative database, Consolidated Lead Evaluation and Reporting (CLEAR). TR markets CLEAR in these terms: “a vast collection of public and proprietary records…exclusive data feeds, quality domestic data …with source transparency and frequent updates, all in a single platform.” By March of this year, TR had $45 million in contracts and subawards with ICE. An additional contract for $7.4 million signed March 31, 2026, provides DHS with continued access to CLEAR.

CLEAR offers a supplemental data service called License Plate Recognition (LPR). This database was put to use on the streets of Minneapolis in January 2026, at the height of ICE’s Operation Metro Surge. Several thousand ICE agents, armed and masked, swarmed through the streets of the city, striving after the presidential goal of 3,000 deportations a day across the nation. A year earlier, on January 28, 2025, just a week after Trump’s inauguration, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had maintained that all undocumented immigrants were considered “criminals” under federal law. A spokesperson for DHS referred to clearing a “backlog of undocumented persons.”

To that end, ICE purchased a wealth of personal and sensitive information, including smartphone location, housing, and labor data.

Visuals of ICE agents scanning license plates on the streets of Minneapolis were pervasive in January. LPR enables ICE to instantly read a plate, adding it to a database of millions of records. When a license plate is photographed, it is not only a plate that is captured. People—children and bystanders—are caught in the dragnet as well as lawn signs and other data.

In the mayhem surrounding the ICE agents’ actions, US citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti were fatally shot. To date, none of the ICE shooters has been charged with a crime. On July 13, The New York Times reported, “After months of resistance, the Justice Department has shared evidence related to…shootings by immigration agents in Minnesota with state and local investigators, the county prosecutor in Minneapolis said.”

Billie Little says, “It was outrageous. It was murder. This should not be happening in a democratic society. It is legal to observe authorities. Our right to protest is foundational.”

“I lost my mind over this,” said one TR staffer in Minneapolis, name withheld for fear of retribution. She described “disgust” and “moral injury” from what she witnessed. “Thomson Reuters is profiting off the terrorizing.”

John Boehler, policy counsel with the ACLU of Minnesota, writes, “Following, observing or reporting on federal agencies or federal activities is not a criminal activity—it’s protected First Amendment activity. To be using those cameras, to use those license plate readers, to surveil protesters has a chilling effect on First Amendment rights, and that’s what we think the goal is.”

TR’s surveillance........

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