Trump's IRS Gave ICE 47,289 Taxpayer Addresses After Treasury Bypassed the Reviewing Lawyer

The Addresses Went Out

In June 2025, IRS lawyers determined that they could not process a request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for address records on millions of people.¹² When ICE submitted its next request, Treasury officials directed IRS staff to bypass the official leading the review and get approval from a different one, who gave it that day.¹ On August 7, the IRS sent ICE 47,289 confidential taxpayer addresses.³

The procedure accepted nonexistent ZIP codes such as 99999 in place of a real address, and ICE named one officer as the investigator for about 1.28 million people.⁴⁵

President Donald Trump's Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and his Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, signed the agreement behind the transfer, citing his executive order.⁶³ His White House spokesperson called the system part of his mass-deportation promise, "the promise that the American people elected him on and he is committed to fulfilling."⁷

Nina Olson is executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, which provides free or low-cost tax representation; she reported that immigrant taxpayers became less willing to attend events or seek guidance.⁵¹ In September 2026, a unanimous federal appeals panel upheld an injunction against the procedure, finding the challengers likely to prove it contrary to the tax-privacy law.⁵

Center for Taxpayer Rights v. Internal Revenue Service, No. 26-5006, p. 25⁵

The Data-Exchange Procedure indisputably contravenes the requirements of section 6103.

Refusal, Agreement, Another Refusal

The IRS refused ICE more than once before the addresses went out.¹² On February 18, 2025, ICE asked it to help locate about 700,000 people under final removal orders, seeking addresses, Social Security numbers, relatives and IP information.²¹ The IRS refused: its chief counsel concluded the request did not qualify because removal proceedings are generally civil, while the tax-law exception covers criminal matters.¹

On April 7, Bessent and Noem signed a memorandum of understanding on behalf of Treasury and Homeland Security; no IRS official appears in its approval block.⁶³ The agreement cited Executive Order 14161 and represented that the people ICE would ask about were under criminal investigation.⁶ Trump's order, signed January 20, did not mention tax records or the IRS, covered a narrower group than the agreement's recital suggested and required implementation consistent with the law; the agreement likewise made provisions conflicting with federal law void.⁸⁶

The Associated Press reported, citing two people familiar with the decision, that acting IRS commissioner Melanie Krause would step down over the agreement.⁹ On April 17, the IRS revised its manual to remove its former policy of rejecting requests for addresses alone.²

ICE came back with larger requests.² On June 5 it sought address information for 7,615,279 people, and the IRS rejected that request two days later.² A June 24 request sought about 7.3 million records, and Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly later found that IRS lawyers again determined they could not process it.²¹ Her opinion says what happened when ICE submitted the next one.¹

Center for Taxpayer Rights v. IRS, ECF 54, p. 8¹

Treasury officials directed IRS officials to bypass A.D. and obtain legal approval from a different IRS official, “A.M.”

The opinion identifies the officials by initials.¹ ProPublica separately reported, citing an obtained email, that acting IRS general counsel Andrew De Mello refused to give ICE 7.3 million taxpayers' addresses; citing people familiar with the dispute, it reported that he was forced out two days later, on June 27.⁷ The administration did not answer its questions about his departure.⁷

One Officer for 1.28 Million People

On June 27, 2025, acting ICE director Todd Lyons requested the last known addresses of about 1.28 million people, identifying the same Enforcement and Removal Operations assistant director as the officer engaged in every investigation.³⁵¹ His stated reason was that the information could be relevant to investigating the crime of willfully failing to depart after a final removal order.⁵ On July 1, the IRS authorized processing; Treasury's deputy general counsel gave it permission to begin sharing information back to ICE.⁵

Kollar-Kotelly found it implausible that one officer could personally handle approximately 47,000 criminal matters, much less 1.28 million.¹ She set that beside what White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told ProPublica, that the system was part of Trump's promise "to carry out the mass deportation of criminal illegal aliens"; the government did not contest her statement in court.⁷¹ Considering the sweeping requests and the White House's statement together, the judge drew a preliminary inference that ICE's criminal-investigation rationale was a pretext.¹

What the IRS Checked, and What It Skipped

Section 6103 of the tax code makes returns and return information confidential, including a taxpayer's mailing address.¹⁰ Its exception for non-tax criminal investigations covers taxpayer identity without a judge's order, at a price: the written request must supply the taxpayer's name and address, the taxable period, the criminal statute being investigated and a specific reason the information is relevant.¹⁰ The IRS may disclose it only to agency personnel personally and directly engaged in the investigation.¹⁰

For the address, the IRS's automated procedure checked that ICE's address field was not blank and contained a five- or nine-digit number.⁴³ The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that nonexistent ZIP codes such as 99999 and 00000 passed, as did some five-digit street numbers in addresses lacking a ZIP code.⁴

When ICE supplied a taxpayer identification number, the IRS matched it and the person's name to its records and returned its own last known address.³ It compared addresses only when ICE supplied no taxpayer number.³ Most of the file went out the first way: 42,695 of the 47,289 addresses were matched by taxpayer number, without comparing the address ICE supplied to the IRS's records.³ The inspector general found that the 47,289 records corresponded to about 46,965 people.⁴

The IRS estimates that fewer than 5% of the disclosed records had potentially incomplete or insufficient ICE-provided address information, and it identified none of these defects in the address-matching method.³ It had rejected approximately 2.6% of the initial requests during preprocessing.³

Kollar-Kotelly counted the larger number: on February 26, 2026, she concluded in an indicative ruling, which ordered no new relief while the case was on appeal, that the IRS violated the tax code approximately 42,695 times by using the taxpayer-number method without confirming ICE supplied each taxpayer's address.¹¹

The inspector general raised its concerns in November and December 2025, and the IRS confirmed the invalid-address problems.⁴ Treasury notified Homeland Security on January 23, 2026, and requested remediation, including appropriate disposal of data disclosed on deficient requests; IRS Chief Risk and Control Officer Dottie Romo corrected the government's statements to the court on February 11.³ Kollar-Kotelly faulted the nearly three-week delay in notifying the court and plaintiffs, but did not decide whether the government acted in bad faith.¹¹

The watchdog also found that small differences in names and address formatting caused the system to miss possible matches, including STREET versus ST; it did not quantify these failures.⁴ ICE still had unresolved security findings when the addresses arrived, having missed corrective-action reports due in January and July 2024 and January 2025; the inspector general described a potential risk to taxpayer data.⁴ ICE submitted a corrective-action plan in July 2025, but provided no dates for completing the planned actions.⁴ It made no recommendations, citing pending litigation and an ongoing safeguards review.⁴ Its June report recorded the IRS's statement that it had shared no additional data with ICE under the agreement.⁴

Taxpayers Withdrew From Help

For years, the IRS warned that sharing tax information with immigration authorities would discourage compliance.¹²¹³ In 2004 Commissioner Mark Everson told Congress that sharing confidential information would chill efforts to bring holders of Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) into the tax system; these numbers serve taxpayers ineligible for Social Security numbers.¹²¹³ The National Taxpayer Advocate warned in 2016 that taxpayers could stop filing and paying out of fear of deportation.¹³ The IRS reiterated in November 2024 that immigration enforcement did not authorize disclosure.⁵ Those assurances left room for limited exceptions for criminal investigations, and in 2025 the administration invoked one.¹²¹³⁶

At the Center for Taxpayer Rights, Olson reported a drastic reduction in cases involving taxpayers without Social Security numbers, because potential clients feared disclosure of their status or location to ICE.⁵¹ The clinic reallocated nearly 10% of its operating expenses to increased outreach.⁵ The D.C. Circuit upheld the finding of irreparable injury to the Center for Taxpayer Rights: its clients face strict IRS deadlines, and failure to reach them in time can permanently foreclose relief.⁵

In a second lawsuit, in Massachusetts, the Community Economic Development Center alleged a 25% reduction in tax returns filed through its ITIN service in 2025, with lost revenue attributed to the agencies' data sharing.¹⁴ The National Parents Union alleged that one member feared claiming a substantial 2025 tax refund because filing his current address could expose him to ICE.¹⁴ On September 30, 2026, Judge Indira Talwani found these allegations sufficient at the pleading stage and let the claims against the data sharing proceed.¹⁴ She dismissed one, a separate challenge to the agencies' authority, because administrative-law review already provided a route to challenge the same conduct.¹⁴

In granting preliminary relief in February 2026, Talwani also found that the chilling effect reached members with deferred-action status who were not subject to criminal prosecution; being chilled from filing deprived members of needed tax credits and further complicated their immigration statuses.²

Updated Addresses, Then an Injunction

The White House's stated goal was mass deportation of criminal illegal aliens; ICE's December account established about 33,000 updated addresses and no further use, including no arrests or removals from the file.⁷¹⁵

In that account, a December 22, 2025 declaration, ICE Assistant Director Richard S. Fitzgerald said the agency had compared the IRS data with its list of people under final removal orders, and that the file sat at that point on the lead architect's government-issued computer, accessible only to that person.¹⁵ Access expanded to two additional ICE officials on January 23, 2026, for the stated purpose of creating adequate safeguards.¹¹

Talwani found a high likelihood that ICE's handling, use and storage of the addresses violated and continued to violate section 6103.² The comparison was impermissible because the staff doing it were not personally engaged in the qualifying criminal investigations; storage on the lead architect's computer also violated the law's access restrictions.² On February 5, 2026, she barred ICE and Homeland Security from inspecting, using, copying, distributing or otherwise acting on the information obtained under the arrangements.² On September 30, 2026, she reported that the government had appealed her injunction, had sought no stay, and that the injunction remained in effect.¹⁴

Her order did not require return or destruction of the data; Romo subsequently said the agencies had confirmed they would refrain from using it while the related injunction remained pending.²³ The disclosure had already occurred.³

The Defense, and What the Courts Decided

The strongest defense is that a lawful request requires disclosure: when an authorized agency meets the exception's conditions, the IRS must provide the covered address information, even without this agreement.¹⁰¹⁶ Willful failure to depart within 90 days of a final removal order can be a federal crime, subject to statutory exceptions, generally punishable by up to four years in prison, or ten years for specified classes.¹⁷

On the agreement itself, the government won.¹⁶¹⁸ On May 12, 2025, Trump-appointed Judge Dabney Friedrich refused to block it, after government counsel assured her that the IRS would reject requests supporting civil proceedings.¹⁶¹⁹ A unanimous D.C. Circuit panel affirmed in February 2026, leaving later agency actions undecided.¹⁸

The transfer was one of those later actions, and the government defended it as a lawful project with limited errors.²⁰ Its appellate brief says the IRS's section 6103 experts unanimously agreed that the request complied, the commissioner approved disclosure, and Treasury insisted on statutory compliance.²⁰ It disputed what the bypass implied, argued that the law did not require address matching, and said deficient records were a small portion subject to remediation.²⁰ The IRS's under-5% estimate and rejection of some requests supported that account, but the courts identified failures in the procedure itself.³⁵

On November 21, 2025, Kollar-Kotelly stopped the policy and required notice before further disclosures.²¹ She found four statutory defects, among them inadequate assurance of personally engaged investigators and inadequate confirmation of taxpayer addresses.¹ She also found the challengers likely to prove the policy unlawful for a separate reason: the IRS had not explained its change, weighed privacy and tax-compliance harms, or considered people who had relied on its confidentiality assurances.¹

ICE was not a party to that case, so Kollar-Kotelly could not order it directly to return or destroy the file; she declined to order the IRS to seek destruction.¹ She instead ordered the IRS to notify ICE that the August disclosure was unlawful and ordered Bessent or his designee to require ICE to restrict access to authorized criminal investigators and, when the permitted use ended, return the data or make it undisclosable, with the notices and any ICE response filed in court.²¹

Three Obama-appointed D.C. Circuit judges unanimously affirmed in September 2026: the agreement followed the law, but the procedure accepted requests without an actual taxpayer address or an identified employee personally engaged in the investigation.^5222324 Judge Patricia Millett also sat on the February panel that upheld the agreement itself.¹⁸⁵ A nonempty contact field sufficed even if it listed an unknown person or someone still to be designated.⁵ The government's lawyer conceded an address-related implementation error and could not say what had been done to fix it.⁵

The panel criticized ICE's nonspecific justification but left undecided whether that defect was a single approval failure or a continuing feature of the procedure.⁵ To the government's argument that the injunction impeded law enforcement, it answered that the government had no legitimate interest in investigating crimes in violation of the statute.⁵

The Abuse of Public Trust

The government invokes the presumption that officials act lawfully; the injunctions were interim orders, no court found a willful disclosure violation, and two things have not been established: a personal instruction from Trump for the transfer, and a direction from either signer to bypass the lawyer or build the defective procedure.²⁰³¹⁵² What the evidence shows is that Trump's Cabinet secretaries signed the agreement citing his order, Treasury officials bypassed the reviewing IRS official, and his White House publicly backed the project.⁶³¹⁷

Hamilton described impeachable offenses as abuses or violations of public trust.²⁵ The precedent concerns tax records.²⁶ Before 1976, the President and his appointees controlled much of the access to tax returns, and Watergate hearings revealed that White House counsel John Dean had sought to use the IRS to harass political enemies.²⁷ In July 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted 28 to 10 for an impeachment article charging Nixon with seeking confidential IRS information, personally and through subordinates, for purposes unauthorized by law.²⁶²⁸ The House never voted on it and the Senate never tried it before his resignation.²⁶²⁸ In 1976 Congress replaced executive control with statutory disclosure rules and raised criminal disclosure violations from misdemeanors to felonies.²⁷²⁹ Here, the law required disclosure for valid criminal-investigation requests; the administration failed the conditions Congress imposed.¹⁰⁵

Trump's administration took information people supplied to pay their taxes and opened it to a mass request from immigration enforcement.³⁵ It did so after Treasury bypassed the reviewing lawyer, through a procedure that a unanimous appeals panel held likely contrary to law.¹⁵ That is the abuse of public trust this case presents: using confidential tax records for the President's deportation project without honoring the safeguards Congress made the price of access.⁵⁷²⁷