JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
You may have heard of the multinational company Thomson Reuters. It owns the Reuters news wire, and it also has a huge legal database, and it’s a data broker that collects vast amounts of personal information. But some Thomson Reuters employees are concerned that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement may be using the company’s products unlawfully. NPR’s Jude Joffe-Block has more.
JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK, BYLINE: Billie Little worked for Thomson Reuters for close to two decades. Her job was in legal publishing, but she’d heard a little about her company’s investigative tools, mostly that they were used by law enforcement to catch serious bad guys.
BILLIE LITTLE: To go after, like, human traffickers or – for child exploitation and those types of things. So that was all to the good, and I could feel good about that, right?
JOFFE-BLOCK: But Little’s feelings about those products began to shift this winter as federal immigration agents surged in the Twin Cities area where Thomson Reuters has a large office.
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JOFFE-BLOCK: Videos like this one, published by the New York Post, showed people dragged out of their cars by ICE agents.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Let her go. Let her go.
JOFFE-BLOCK: And after Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti were both fatally shot by federal agents, Little heard from her Minnesota colleagues that they were scared.
LITTLE: People afraid to go to work, people afraid to take their kids to school, people being followed.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Then a post was shared on an employee chat that said Thomson Reuters is a top corporate collaborator with ICE.
LITTLE: And after that post, everybody was kind of, like, what? (Laughter). There was a lot of confusion and anger, concern.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Management shut down the comments on the post, Little says, but she and others looked into it. ICE uses a Thomson Reuters investigative product called CLEAR. It aggregates billions of private and public records on people, including vehicle registration records and images from license plate readers.
LITTLE: I’d heard the company is saying that the tools weren’t being used to locate undocumented workers that haven’t committed crimes. But it was clear from the numbers of people that were being arrested and detained, I believe, that that couldn’t be true.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Plus, NPR and other media have reported on how federal agents have seemingly used license plate data to identify and intimidate protesters and observers. Little helped form a committee of concerned employees. In February, they sent management a letter, flagging that federal agents might be using the company’s technology unlawfully by skirting sanctuary and privacy laws as well as constitutional protections. The letter got an initial response, Little says.
LITTLE: They called us brave for bringing it up to their attention.
JOFFE-BLOCK: But then nothing happened. No answers were provided, no meetings were scheduled, she says. A few days after The New York Times wrote about the employees’ efforts in March, Little says HR called her in.
LITTLE: Instead of addressing our concerns, they turn toward investigating me.
JOFFE-BLOCK: She was fired a few days later. Last week, Little filed a lawsuit against the company accusing them of violating a law in her home state of Oregon that bars companies from firing whistleblowers. An unnamed Thomson Reuters spokesperson told NPR in an email it would be inappropriate to comment on an individual employment matter, but wrote, we strongly dispute the allegations and intend to robustly defend the case. The spokesperson wrote the company takes employee concerns seriously and provides clear channels to raise issues, and that the company takes seriously the legality and legitimacy of their products. Meanwhile, a Canadian union that is a Thomson Reuters shareholder has recently revived its own related concerns.
EMMA PULLMAN: We have been engaging with the company since 2020 about its contracts with ICE.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Emma Pullman is the head of shareholder engagement at the British Columbia General Employees’ Union.
PULLMAN: The questions that Billie Little was asking of her employer weren’t all that different from the questions that we, as a long-term shareholder, have been asking
JOFFE-BLOCK: The union recently filed a formal shareholder proposal to commission an independent human rights assessment into how Thomson Reuters’ products are used by law enforcement and immigration authorities. As for Billie Little, she says she hopes to raise awareness about the privacy and civil liberties concerns she has about how Americans’ personal data is being used. Jude Joffe-Block, NPR News.
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