IRS has a system to easily deliver information on undocumented immigrants to ICE
The immigration agency made a request for more than seven million physical addresses of people who pay taxes with ITIN
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has a system that will allow it to easily deliver information on undocumented immigrants, such as their addresses, to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The program The case is moving forward as the U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C., reviews a District Court decision that authorized the IRS to share information with ICE, but limited it to court cases the agency can prove.
ICE's goal is to obtain detailed information on undocumented immigrants with Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs).
The development of the system was revealed by ProPublica, which obtained an IRS email outlining the project and the dispute in June with an official fired for refusing to hand over information to the immigration agency.
IRS Acting General Counsel Andrew De Mello refused to hand over the addresses of 7.3 million taxpayers requested by ICE, but was later forced to resign, the report reveals.
But what did De Mello do? Basically, he denied the information to ICE. An IRS official told ProPublica it was virtually “impossible” for the agency to have more than 7 million criminal investigations underway. “It’s impossible for ICE to have 7 million actual criminal investigations; that’s a fantasy,” the senior IRS official said. The source told ProPublica that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which includes ICE was essentially pressuring the IRS into a mass data breach violating personal data laws and circumventing a ruling by U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich. Previously, when law enforcement requested data from the IRS to support their investigations, agencies would provide the IRS with the full legal name of the individual in question, a registered address and an explanation of why the information was relevant to a criminal investigation,” the ProPublica report said.“Such requests rarely involved more than a dozen people at a time.”
The immigration agency’s irregular request was also questioned by Danny Werfel, IRS commissioner during the Biden administration, who stated that privacy laws that allow federal officials to obtain taxpayer data “have never been interpreted as an avenue to share thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of tax records for a broad-based enforcement initiative,” as ICE attempts to do.
Despite this, a White House spokesperson told ProPublica that the use of such data is legal and argued that it was to comply with the deportation of “illegal criminal aliens.”