IRS To Share Tax Data With ICE, DHS For Deportations

This morning, the Washington Post reported that it had obtained an agreement between Immigrations and Customs and Enforcement (ICE) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), allowing the immigration agency as well as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to access confidential tax records in order to carry out deportation orders.

The agreement is limited to confirming the addresses of "known unlawful immigrants who already have been ordered to leave the country," as stated by the Washington Post. Requests "must include the name and address of each taxpayer, the date of their order for removal and other identifying information that would allow the IRS to verify the taxpayer’s identity."

"About half — possibly more — of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country file income tax returns to document their payments to the U.S. government," writes the Washington Post. “It is a complete betrayal of 30 years of the government telling immigrants to file their taxes,” the publication cites a former IRS official, pointing out that many of the deported are in fact legal immigrants.

Two weeks ago, the Trump administration's ICE placed Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil in detention for deportation on orders of the State Department for organizing protests against Israel's genocide in Palestine. Last week, ICE deported a soccer player as well as a barber from Venezuela to El Salvador's CECOT maximum security prison, known for torture and inmate deaths. Neither of the two men had a criminal record and legally entered the US seeking asylum. The administration apparently used tattoos to allege that the men were members of the criminal gang Tren de Aragua.

The Washington Post calls this agreement "unprecedented," but using taxpayer information to aid deportations has a long and dark history originating in Nazi Germany. Beginning in 1938, tax records and financial data were systemically used to identify, plunder, and ultimately deport Jewish individuals in a collaboration between financial authorities, the Gestapo and the SS – a practice widely credited as one of the major methods to aid the Third Reich's "industrialization" of the Holocaust.

The disclosure of confidential tax information marks a drastic increase in financial surveillance in the US, but it's not the first order of the Trump administration to use financial data to prosecute non-citizens.

Last week, the Treasury announced that it would lower the reporting threshold for 30 counties along the Mexican border from $10,000 down to $200 to fight narcotics trafficking and gang activity – a move which will not just affect those involved in criminal conduct, but anyone, including US citizens, located in the affected areas.

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