Inset: President-elect Donald Trump on “Meet the Press” Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024 (NBC News/YouTube). Background: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducting a raid (Fox News/YouTube). Inset: Screengrab from the ACLU’s ongoing social media campaign against mass deportations (ACLU/Instagram).
The Internal Revenue Service is allowed to share taxpayer information with U.S. immigration authorities, a federal judge ruled Monday, denying an injunction request that said the Trump administration was using the sensitive info to unlawfully “identify the location of targets for immigration enforcement.”
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, an appointee of President Donald Trump, said there was no evidence that the IRS information would be used for anything other than targeting individuals under criminal investigation, as claimed by the Department of Homeland Security.
“The Court agrees that requesting and receiving information for civil enforcement purposes would constitute a cognizable injury, but none of the organizations have established that such an injury is imminent,” Friedrich wrote in a memorandum opinion and order.
“As the plaintiffs acknowledge, the Memorandum only allows sharing information for criminal investigations,” she added. “The Court cannot assume that DHS intends to use the shared information to facilitate civil rather than criminal proceedings.”
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Friedrich’s ruling comes amid a lawsuit brought by immigrant rights groups against Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, along with the IRS and DHS, over the tax information being shared. Plaintiffs include Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, Immigrant Solidarity DuPage, Somos Un Pueblo Unido, and Inclusive Action for the City.
“At its core, this case presents a narrow legal issue: Does the Memorandum of Understanding between the IRS and DHS violate the Internal Revenue Code?” Friedrich wrote. “It does not.”
In prior filings, the immigrant groups argued that if the IRS “unlawfully disclosed” the taxpayer information to enforcement authorities, it would “irreparably destroy the confidence” that taxpaying immigrant workers have placed in the IRS’s “prior assurances that their personal information would be protected.”
The data allegedly includes the addresses of immigrant taxpayers from their IRS filings. According to the groups, DHS has requested information for an estimated 700,000 individuals.
Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary of public affairs, told Fox News on Monday that the information being shared is important because it is used to “determine what public safety and terror threats may exist so we can neutralize them, scrub these individuals from voter rolls, as well as identify what public benefits these aliens are using at taxpayer expense.”
Attempts by Law&Crime to reach the IRS and DHS for comment were not immediately successful.
