Federal judge blocks IRS from sharing information to help ICE with deportations
By Marshall Cohen, CNN
(CNN) — A federal judge on Friday blocked the IRS from giving ICE the home addresses of taxpayers who might be undocumented immigrants — dealing a blow to the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts.
The ruling is a significant victory for immigrant-rights group and liberal activists who are trying to resist the mass deportations that President Donald Trump has made a top priority for the first year of his second term.
The Trump administration can appeal the decision, and it has a decent track record this year of overturning lower-court losses. A separate federal judge in a related case previously declined to block the data-sharing deal between Internal Revenue Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Court records indicate that the IRS has provided ICE with information about 47,000 potentially undocumented taxpayers so far as part of the controversial data-sharing deal, a fraction of what the Trump administration requested. The Department of Homeland Security has said it wants this information to find people who came to the US illegally and have already been ordered by a judge to leave the country.
The IRS rebuffed, and ultimately rejected, attempts to get information on millions of suspected undocumented immigrants with existing deportation orders. These disagreements created months of tension between IRS leadership and the White House, leading to the resignation and ouster of multiple IRS commissioners this year including Billy Long, a Trump loyalist.
CNN has reached out to the IRS and Treasury Department for comment.
District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said in her 94-page ruling Friday that the data-sharing program was unlawful for several reasons, including because it violated legal requirements to keep sensitive taxpayer information private except for very strict exceptions, regardless of their immigration status.
“Plaintiffs have shown that the IRS’s disclosure of confidential taxpayer address information to ICE was contrary to law because it did not comply with certain requirements in (the) Internal Revenue Code,” wrote Kollar-Kotelly, a Bill Clinton appointee.
An order blocking the program was necessary because undocumented taxpayers were suffering irreparable harm, she said.
The judge rejected many of the Justice Department’s arguments for why the program was legal, concluding, among other things, that certain assertions were not credible. For instance, DOJ officials claimed that one single ICE agent was personally overseeing tens of thousands of investigations that might lead to criminal prosecutions and deportations.
“The Court finds it unlikely that a single individual could be ‘personally and directly engaged’ in approximately 47,000 criminal matters, let alone 1.28 million of them, as ICE represented to the IRS,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote.
This case was brought by the Center for Taxpayer Rights, a nonpartisan nonprofit that said the policy was hurting its clients at a low-income clinic, including undocumented immigrants. Millions of undocumented immigrants pay taxes each year — for decades, they have been encouraged to register with the IRS and pay what they owe, with assurances that their private information would stay confidential except for extremely rare cases.
Other anti-Trump groups involved in the lawsuit praised the ruling.
“This is an important win for millions of people in America whose information has been threatened by the Trump-Vance administration… the privacy laws enacted in the post-Watergate era exist to prevent abuses of power like this and yet leaders in the IRS and ICE launched this effort,” Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, said in a statement.
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