Another Anti-Immigrant Lie Exposed: IRS Records Will Be Used To Track Down Undocumented Immigrants

Lots of lies are told about immigrants to stoke the always-smoldering fires of bigotry in this country. Trump and his fellow Republicans have told most of them. They claim immigrants commit more crimes than legal residents, something that has never been true. They claim immigrants are lazy, something anyone who’s ever worked with any immigrants knows to be demonstrably false.

Then there’s the stupid claims that not only do immigrants “steal” jobs, they also help themselves to taxpayer-funded social services while not bothering to pay their fair share of taxes, if they even bother to pay taxes at all.

This is also demonstrably false. Undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes every year. In fact, there’s evidence immigrants are a net positive on the federal government’s balance sheet:

The Social Security Administration estimated in 2010, for example, that such immigrants contribute $12 billion per year more to the Social Security system than they take out, he noted.

If there’s anything proven to lower immigrants’ tax contributions, it’s harsh, vindictive anti-immigrant actions and policies. Trump and his administration should already be aware of this, considering what happened the last time he was in office.

[A]s the Trump administration cracks down on illegal immigration, there’s some anecdotal evidence that fewer immigrants using ITINs are choosing to file their taxes this year [2017].

“Many of our clients are telling us that in years past they felt more hope and more of an ability to have a pathway toward citizenship and lately there’s a lot less hope,” says Max Moy-Borgen, who runs the tax program at the Mission Economic Development Agency in San Francisco…

Overall, tax service providers in the San Francisco Bay Area say there’s about a 20 percent decline in the number of people filing with ITINs. There are similar reports from service providers in other areas of the country, according to Francine Lipman, who teaches tax law at the University of Nevada.

But actions speak louder than words, even well-researched words and a massive amount of anecdotal data. If Trump and his buddies truly believe most immigrants don’t pay taxes, they wouldn’t be deputizing the IRS to help ICE track down undocumented immigrants.

The Internal Revenue Service is nearing an agreement to allow immigration officials to use tax data to confirm the names and addresses of people suspected of being in the country illegally, according to four people familiar with the matter, culminating weeks of negotiations over using the tax system to support President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

Under the agreement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement could submit names and addresses of suspected undocumented immigrants to the IRS to cross-reference with confidential taxpayer databases, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of professional reprisals.

In a normal world, this wouldn’t even be considered an immigration enforcement option. The IRS is supposed to limit its sharing of this sensitive data and, historically, warrants or other court orders are needed to gain access to individual records. In this proposed agreement, ICE and other border control DHS components would have blanket access to any records pertaining to people subject to “final removal orders.”

Of course, final removal orders are pretty easy to obtain, especially when the orders coming from the Commander in Chief are to remove as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Plus, there’s a sizable asterisk attached to this single purported access restriction:

The agreement would authorize data verification for people “subject to criminal investigation” for violating immigration law.

If so, then it will never be limited to people subject to final removal orders, which would require requests for data to be signed off on by the director of the DHS or one of Kristi Noem’s appointed subordinates. This escape valve would allow ICE (and other DHS components) to access taxpayer data solely because an investigator believes a person might be in the country illegally.

Not that the IRS is on board with this. Or, at least, it wasn’t until very recently. As the Washington Post reports, a demand for data on 700,000(!) people the Trump administration claimed were in the country illegally was rejected by the IRS. IRS commissioner Doug O’Donnell, along with agency attorneys, stated the request was unlawful.

Then this happened.

O’Donnell retired the next day, after 38 years at the tax agency. His successor, Melanie Krause, quickly signaled an interest in collaborating with Homeland Security officials, The Post has reported.

Two weeks later, the Trump administration also replaced the IRS’s top attorney, who had voiced opposition to attempts to share taxpayer data across agencies, including by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service.

While this is all very terrible, you really can’t blame O’Donnell for retiring. All that did was accelerate the inevitable by a few days. Trump’s administration would likely have fired him anyway, just like it did the attorneys that backed O’Donnell’s refusal to turn over this data.

Equally as terrible is the rationale that underlies this massive data exfiltration project. Trump and his allies always knew their claims about immigrants were outright lies. But they served the purpose of putting them back in power. Now that the lies are no longer useful, they can simply be ignored so the Trump administration can leverage what it has always know (but never said) about immigrants: they’re honest, hard-working, and law-abiding. And now he’s going to punish them for nothing more than daring to continue to exist in the face of his increasing cruel, incredibly bigoted attacks.