The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is reportedly nearing a deal to allow immigration officials to use tax data to support Donald Trump’s deportation agenda, according to reports by the Washington Post.
Under the proposed data-sharing agreement, said to have been in negotiations for weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) could hand over the names and addresses of undocumented immigrants to the IRS, raising concerns about abuse of power from the Trump administration and the erosion of privacy rights.
If access to this confidential database is agreed upon, it would mark a significant shift, likely becoming the first time immigration officials have relied on the tax system for enforcement assistance in such a sweeping way.
Under the agreement, the IRS would cross-reference names of undocumented immigrants with their confidential taxpayer databases, a move that would breach the longstanding trust in the confidentiality of tax information. Such data has historically been considered sensitive and thereby closely guarded, so the reported deal has raised alarm bells at the IRS, according to the Washington Post.
The IRS website says that undocumented immigrants “are subject to US taxes despite their illegal status”, and because most are unable to get social security numbers, the agency allows them to file with individual taxpayer numbers, known as ITINs. The agency also subjects them to the same reporting and withholding obligations as it does to US citizens who receive the same kind of income. More than half of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US file income tax returns to document their payments to the government.
While the IRS mandates that taxpayer information is protected, section 6103 on the agency’s website outlines that “under court order, return information may be shared with law enforcement agencies for investigation and prosecution of non-tax criminal laws.” However, sources familiar with the matter told the Washington Post that it would be rare for these privacy law exceptions to be weaponized for cooperation with immigration enforcement and that this was outside of standard procedure.
The potential shift in taxpayer data use, from once being used to rarely build criminal cases to now reportedly becoming instrumental in enforcing criminal penalties, aligns with many of the more aggressive immigration policies Trump is pursuing.
During his campaign, Trump promised to deport millions of undocumented people in the US, and the reports of this new deal shine a light on how he is planning on doing so. Since becoming president, he has ended legal pathways for immigrants to come and stay in the US.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Friday they would revoke the temporary legal status of more than 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, and Ice raids and enforcement operations have been commonplace in major cities across the US – like Chicago and New York – with high immigrant populations.
And on Sunday, members of the Trump administration defended using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law, to deport the 137 Venezuelan migrants last weekend on the grounds that they were committing violent crimes and sending money back to Venezuela. The administration deported the migrants despite a judge’s verbal orders telling them not to do so.
The so-called border czar, Tom Homan, said in an interview with ABC News that the administration would not defy court orders stemming from legal challenges over its invocation of the wartime Alien Enemies Act to deport the alleged Venezuelan gang members.
“I don’t care what the judges think as far as this case,” Homan told ABC, referring to a federal judge’s efforts to determine whether the administration already ignored an earlier order to temporarily halt deportations.
The attorney general, Pam Bondi, also addressed the deportations in an interview with Fox News on Sunday, calling the fight against the alleged gang members was akin to “modern-day warfare”.
