Weaponized Compliance: ICE-IRS Data-Sharing Agreement

-- By JacobLucero 26 Mar. 2025

Introduction

The recent agreement between the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to share immigrants’ taxpayer information to help President Trump’s mass deportation efforts is a blatant disregard for well-established constitutional safeguards. Turning tax forms into a deportation roadmap not only violates the limits Congress created in § 6103, but also the due-process ‘informational privacy’ doctrine that stands to prohibit the government from baiting people into sharing personal data for one purpose and then weaponizing it for another. Under the guise of law enforcement cooperation, the IRS and ICE agreement embodies a deeply unethical targeting of migrant communities. The IRS and ICE are weaponizing information freely given in good faith to punish those who have sought only to comply with the law. The very individuals who contribute economically and socially, often at great personal risk, are now rendered vulnerable by the very systems they trusted.

Statutory Violations

The Internal Revenue Code has long maintained a strict wall around taxpayer information, notably through U.S. Code § 6103. Section 6103 establishes a flat ban on disclosing “return information,” id. § 6103(a), then lists narrow exceptions. The only remotely relevant carve-out, § 6103(i)(1)(A), allows disclosure via court order when a federal judge finds the material “pertinent to a specific criminal investigation.” The agreement between the IRS and ICE seeks automated, open‑ended transfers for civil removal proceedings—precisely the opposite of the narrow, case‑specific process Congress mandated. By definition, a bulk upload of all ITIN-holder addresses is outside subsection (i)(1)(A).

The IRS created ITINs (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number) in 1996 to help migrants legitimize their place in the United States. Since then, ITINs have been used by individuals with no social security number to pay taxes, get a driver's license, open an interest-bearing savings account, and provide proof of residency. Individuals trying to adjust their immigration status would also use their ITIN number and record of paying taxes to show good moral character.

Naturally individuals without a legal status were concerned about giving their private information to the government, but they were told not to worry. The IRS promised that an ITIN would not be an immigration-enforcement tool. However, that has all changed.

The Trump administration is exploiting a narrow exception within the U.S. Code § 6103, designed for specific criminal investigations, to carry out its mass sharing of data regarding undocumented individuals. What was once an avenue for folks to adjust their immigration status and contribute to our society has become an avenue to their peril.

Constitutional Privacy Implications

The agreement brushes against the still-developing constitutional right to informational privacy—a strand of substantive due process that protects against unwarranted government dissemination of highly personal data. In two seminal cases the Supreme Court has assumed a constitutional right to informational privacy while upholding data‑collection schemes only because strict data protections were in place. In Whalen v. Roe, 429 U.S. 589 (1977), New York’s electronic narcotics registry survived because disclosure was narrowly limited to drug‑diversion control and locked behind criminal penalties, an air‑gapped database, and a no‑redisclosure rule. Thirty‑four years later, NASA v. Nelson, 562 U.S. 134 (2011), applied the same logic, approving background check questionnaires for federal contractors only after confirming the questions were tailored to employment suitability and protected by encryption plus Privacy Act sanctions. Together, the cases set an intermediate‑scrutiny test: the government must (1) seek the information for a legitimately narrow purpose and (2) erect robust safeguards that bar secondary use.

Unlike the background checks in Nelson, the IRS–ICE data transfer offers no individualized tailoring or enforceable confidentiality protections, leaving the privacy burden entirely on a population Congress meant to protect. No statutory penalties bind ICE, and nothing stops the agency from piping the data into fusion centers or bulk‑search algorithms that taxpayers never agreed to.

ITIN applications force disclosure of current address, family identifiers, and financial histories. That information was surrendered “solely for tax-administration purposes.” Repurposing it for civil-immigration enforcement expands the intrusion and fails intermediate scrutiny because less-intrusive, individualized tools, like administrative subpoenas or judicial warrants, were available. Lacking narrow tailoring and Whalen -style safeguards, the bulk transfer flunks intermediate scrutiny and violates the very privacy expectations § 6103 was designed to preserve.

Expansion of the Surveillance State

The IRS and ICE agreement is pushing our country towards becoming a full surveillance state. Tax returns contain virtually every facet of a person’s private life: where they live, how they earn, whom they support, which banks they use, even costly medical conditions revealed through deductions. Once that information is disclosed to ICE, an address becomes a location marker and a dependent’s Social Security number links entire households to investigative watchlists to be monitored—none of which Congress contemplated when it enacted § 6103’s confidentiality wall.

The danger is less a single abuse than the precedent. If tax data can be co-opted for immigration raids or political probes, nothing prevents future administrations from mining it to monitor protest donors or target ideological opponents. It creates a cycle in which disclosures intended for a specific purpose instead fuel an expanding data sweep, eroding public trust and chilling compliance with government reporting requirements. Notwithstanding the erosion of trust, it puts a bullseye on a politically vulnerable, disadvantaged community that lacks the resources to shield itself from the administration’s wrongdoings.

Conclusion

The IRS–ICE agreement violates § 6103’s text and purpose and disregards the Nelson informational privacy framework. Courts should enjoin any bulk transfer of return information lacking a case‑specific judicial order, and Congress should clarify that § 6103’s criminal investigation exception cannot be invoked for civil immigration enforcement. Absent such guardrails, weaponized compliance will become the new normal—first for migrants, then for everyone.

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