Federal immigration enforcement officials told a U.S. district court that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has not used taxpayer information obtained from the IRS to execute deportations, according to a recent set of court filings.
The disclosure, filed late Monday in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, provides additional detail about how ICE accessed IRS records during the Trump administration’s deportation efforts. ICE acknowledged that earlier this year it cross-referenced IRS data against a list of roughly 1.2 million people with final removal orders and identified about 33,000 potentially updated addresses.
However, the agency said it did not act on those matches. ICE told the court that the IRS-derived files were not ingested into enforcement databases and remain under the control of a single Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) staff member.
“The IRS data is currently residing on the [ICE Homeland Security Investigations] lead architect's government-issued computer,” Richard S. Fitzgerald, assistant director of HSI, wrote in the filings. “The lead architect is responsible for transferring data between the operators and other stakeholders. At this juncture, only the lead architect has access to the IRS data.”
The filings were submitted as part of a lawsuit filed by the Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts against the IRS, Treasury, the Social Security Administration (SSA), ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. The plaintiff asks the court to bar federal agencies from sharing taxpayer information, such as addresses, with immigration enforcement — arguing that the tax code generally protects such data from disclosure.
In a related case in Washington, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued an order in November blocking the IRS from sharing tax return information while the court reviews the matter, prompting questions about how much IRS data ICE had already accessed.
Brian Peltier, head of technology strategy at the SSA, told the court the agency will disclose address information only when it does not derive from tax-return sources or when it comes directly from claimants, claimant representatives or United States Postal Service reports.
It remains unclear whether these assurances will satisfy privacy advocates and the groups suing the government. The Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
