IRS, ICE Near Deal to Share Confidential Tax Data on Undocumented Immigrants

Undocumented immigrants, who contribute nearly $100 billion in taxes each year and help fund benefits like Social Security and Medicare while remaining ineligible to receive them, are expected to soon lose the privacy afforded to them by a long-standing Internal Revenue Service policy as the IRS nears a deal with the Trump administration to help with immigration enforcement.

The IRS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are reportedly closing in on an agreement under which Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and acting ICE Director Todd Lyons could request taxpayer data, including names and addresses, of undocumented immigrants who are being investigated for violating immigration laws in order to help officials locate them to carry out deportations.

The Washington Post reported Saturday that after weeks of negotiations, the Trump administration is close to finalizing the deal in an effort to speed up its mass deportation agenda, under which hundreds of immigrants have been rounded up and sent to be detained in El Salvador despite a court order prohibiting their deportation. ICE deported 11,000 immigrants last month, with people who were only accused of committing civil immigration offenses targeted despite Trump's claims that people who had committed violent crimes would be targeted for deportation.

The IRS deal represents "a shocking breach of trust," said former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official Juliette Kayyem.

The former IRS commissioner, Doug O'Donnell, refused to hand over taxpayer data when the administration requested it last month, and resigned shortly after. Melanie Krause, who replaced O'Donnell as acting commissioner, "quickly signaled an interest in collaborating with Homeland Security," according to the Post, and has met several times with DHS and Treasury officials.

Two immigrant rights groups, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos and Immigrant Solidarity Dupage, sued the IRS earlier this month to stop the agency from releasing taxpayer data to ICE and DHS, but last week the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia refused to issue a temporary restraining order "after the IRS represented that information had not yet been released," according to government watchdog Public Citizen, which represented the plaintiffs.

"Attempts by the Trump administration to gain access to the confidential taxpayer databases to engage in mass removal of workers would violate the tax law that protects the privacy of all taxpayers and undermine the protections promised to every taxpayer who files tax returns with the IRS," said Nandan Joshi, an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group. "Attempting to gain access to personal and confidential taxpayer information crosses a line that Congress put into place after [former President] Richard Nixon used tax records to go after his enemies during Watergate."

Joshi said the IRS must disclose the terms of its "unprecedented information sharing agreement."

"The administration's desire to speed up their deportation agenda does not justify jettisoning decades of taxpayer protections," he said. "If this deal is being negotiated in good faith, the government should not need to keep it secret."

Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy for World Relief, a Christian humanitarian group, said the group has long assured undocumented immigrant communities that people can file and pay their taxes without fear of being targeted by immigration authorities "because the IRS explicitly promised they won't talk to ICE."

Under the proposed deal between the IRS and ICE, said journalist Rafael Salido, no undocumented immigrant "will trust the IRS ever again, and so they'll stop paying taxes."

The administration's "attempt to hijack confidential taxpayer data for immigration enforcement in the middle of tax season is not only disturbing and unprecedented, it is reckless," said Kevin Herrera, legal director of Raise the Floor Alliance, which is also representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the IRS.

Undocumented immigrants who file their taxes with individual taxpayer identification numbers "rely on legal protection of their private information to feel safe paying into programs like Social Security, Medicare, and thousands of other essential government services that all Americans use," said Herrera. "Without the assurance of privacy, our entire tax system will be eroded. We will not be idle while our communities are under attack. We will continue to seek judicial intervention and use every tool at our disposal to stop this administration's campaign of prejudice and terror."