IRS Might Soon Share Addresses of Undocumented Taxpayers with ICE

For years, the US Internal Revenue Service has assured undocumented workers that they could file taxes without fear of their information leading to their deportation. It appears the agency will no longer be able to make that promise. According to the Washington Post, the IRS is close to completing a deal with Immigration and Customs Enforcement that would allow the previously private personal information to be shared.

Under the agreement, ICE would be able to send requests for names and addresses of people the agency suspects of being undocumented to the IRS. The IRS would then cross-reference those names across its confidential taxpayer databases to confirm their information. The agreement would reportedly only cover immigrants who have already been ordered to leave the country and requests—a narrower agreement than Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has asked for in the past, but one that still goes farther than ever before. The information would likely be used in an attempt to carry out the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.

It may seem surprising that the IRS doesn’t already do this, but there are good reasons for that. The first is that it’s against the law to share any taxpayer information. With rare exceptions that typically require a court order beforehand, the IRS does not share any person’s tax information, including information as basic as the name and address filed on a person’s tax documents.

The second reason is money. The IRS has long promised undocumented workers that it is safe for them to file taxes without fear of their information being shared with law enforcement. That has resulted in said workers paying taxes. A lot of them, in fact. Undocumented workers paid $100 billion in taxes in 2022. And, because most of those undocumented workers file their taxes with an individual taxpayer identification number rather than a social security number, they aren’t able to claim benefits like the earned income tax credit. They also aren’t eligible for Social Security retirement benefits or health insurance through Medicare. Per the Tax Policy Center, an immigrant who comes to the United States at 25 years old will pay $200,000 more in taxes than what they will get in government benefits.

The Trump administration has been pushing for the IRS to share data on undocumented workers to aid in its attempts to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history.” Last month, the DHS asked the IRS to share the addresses of 700,000 suspected undocumented immigrants—a request that the IRS declined to go along with. But that sweeping request, according to the Washington Post, did lead to the IRS opening up to negotiate a narrower data-sharing deal that would not violate tax privacy laws. That deal now seems imminent.

While legal challenges have already been filed in an attempt to prevent the IRS from sharing information for immigration enforcement purposes, last week a federal judge (one Trump appointed during his first term) rejected a motion to block such an agreement. Several Democratic Senators have started ringing the alarm bells about this, but thus far have generated little by way of resistance. Meanwhile, DHS just shut down its internal watchdog agencies that advocate for immigrants.