A federal judge placed on hold a Trump administration effort to use typically confidential tax information to deport migrants, writing on Friday that the Internal Revenue Service had illegally disseminated the tax data of some migrants this summer.
The order comes in a case, brought by a taxpayer advocacy group, that challenged an I.R.S. decision to provide migrants’ addresses, as included on their tax returns, to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Federal law tightly controls the use of taxpayer information, and several top I.R.S. officials quit this spring over concerns that giving tax records to ICE on a large scale could be illegal.
Still, officials from the two agencies worked for months to create a process for ICE officials to to access addresses on record with the I.R.S. In June, ICE asked the I.R.S. for information on roughly 1.3 million people, and in August, the I.R.S. turned over the last known addresses of roughly 47,000 people, according to court documents.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, nominated by former President Bill Clinton, said on Friday that the I.R.S. plan to share information with ICE was too broad. She said that federal law only allows for the I.R.S. to share tax information with other government officials who are directly involved in an ongoing investigation. The I.R.S. sent the thousands of addresses to a single ICE official, who Judge Kollar-Kotelly said could not have been personally conducting so many investigations.
“Plaintiffs have shown that the I.R.S.’s disclosure of confidential taxpayer address information to ICE was contrary to law,” Judge Kollar-Kotelly wrote.
The judge paused the existing data-sharing agreement between I.R.S. and ICE and said she would need to review any other attempts to share taxpayer information. Previously, she had ordered the I.R.S. to disclose any other ICE requests for tax records.
The I.R.S. has long encouraged undocumented migrants to file a tax return, and many tax lawyers and immigration activists had trusted the agency would not use tax information to deport people. In a report, the Yale Budget Lab estimates that in 2023, unauthorized immigrant workers paid $66 billion in federal taxes, with roughly $43 billion of that taking the form of the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare.
Andrew Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington.
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