Noman Sabit: A federal judge has blocked the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from handing over the home address information of taxpayers who may be undocumented to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued a 94-page ruling Friday in a lawsuit brought by the Center for Taxpayer Rights against the IRS that called the tax collection agency’s information sharing with ICE “unlawful.” She ordered that the IRS halt any further “unlawful” data transfers.
She also assessed that there was a “substantial likelihood” that the data-sharing agreement violated provisions of the Internal Revenue Code and went against the IRS’s own “policy of strict confidentiality.”
The IRS, she wrote, had “failed to consider the reliance interests that were engendered by its prior policy of strict confidentiality, and failed to provide a reasoned explanation for the new Policy.”
However, Kollar-Kotelly noted she could not order ICE or its parent agency — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — to “take any particular action with respect to the information received from the IRS” in August since neither ICE nor DHS were parties in the lawsuit.
ICE requested more than 1.27 million records from the IRS earlier this year, including personal information such as taxpayers’ home addresses, date of birth, fingerprint identification numbers, and more.
Over 47,000 records matched profiles of individuals sought by ICE. The IRS disclosed these records to ICE in response to an Aug. 7 request from the agency.
Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling comes amid a nationwide immigration crackdown bolstered by the Trump administration. President Trump has sought to increase deportations and increase border security since entering office in January.
The administration’s deportation push has spurred several lawsuits against it, many of which have restricted its immigration enforcement measures.
In August, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s attempts to expedite deportations. Earlier this week, another federal judge dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit challenging a New York law that prevents immigration arrests of people travelling to and from court appointments.
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