Saturday, February 28, 2026-A federal judge has ruled that the Internal Revenue Service violated federal law “approximately 42,695 times” by improperly sharing confidential taxpayer information with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under a data-sharing arrangement with the Department of Homeland Security aimed at identifying and deporting immigrants.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found that the IRS disclosed the last known addresses of taxpayers without ensuring that ICE’s request met the legal requirements under Section 6103 of the federal tax code, one of the strictest privacy protections in U.S. law. In many cases, ICE’s request lacked valid address information, yet IRS staff still provided additional details in violation of the statute.
The finding stems from a sworn declaration by the IRS’s chief risk and control officer, which showed that the agency provided DHS with information on roughly 47,000 individuals out of 1.28 million names requested — and that in most of those cases address data was shared without proper verification.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly wrote that the IRS “not only failed to ensure that ICE’s request for confidential taxpayer address information met the statutory requirements, but this failure led the IRS to disclose confidential taxpayer addresses … in situations where ICE’s request … was patently deficient.” The scale of the disclosures has drawn sharp criticism from privacy and taxpayer rights advocates who argue the violations were systemic rather than isolated.
The federal government is appealing the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, while separate court orders continue to block bulk transfers of IRS data and bar ICE from acting on information already obtained. The controversy has intensified debate over interagency data sharing, taxpayer confidentiality, and how federal agencies balance enforcement priorities with legal limits designed to protect sensitive personal information.
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