A federal judge, appointed by former President Bill Clinton, has temporarily halted President Donald Trump’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents locate illegal aliens using tax information.
Late last week, United States District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly for the District of Columbia issued a stay or preliminary injunction to prevent the IRS from handing over tax information to ICE agents seeking to locate illegal aliens.
“Plaintiffs have shown a substantial likelihood that both the IRS’s implementation of the Address-Sharing Policy and its subsequent sharing of taxpayer information with ICE were unlawful under the [Administrative Procedure Act (APA)],” Kollar-Kotelly wrote:
Plaintiffs have shown that the IRS’s implementation of the AddressSharing Policy was arbitrary and capricious because the IRS failed to recognize that it was departing from its prior policy of strict confidentiality, failed to consider the reliance interests that were engendered by its prior policy of strict confidentiality, and failed to provide a reasoned explanation for the new Policy. Furthermore, Plaintiffs have shown that the IRS’s disclosure of confidential taxpayer address information to ICE was contrary to law because it violated several provisions of Internal Revenue Code Section 6103(i)(2). For similar reasons, Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that the IRS’s broader Data Policy is unlawful under the APA. [Emphasis added]
The deal, which was historic for both ICE and the IRS, allowed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem or ICE Director Todd Lyons to submit a request to the IRS for information regarding an illegal alien who has been ordered to be deported.
From there, IRS officials could hand over information on such illegal aliens.
The IRS-ICE deal came after officials with the former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) said they had found potentially millions of illegal aliens on Social Security and Medicaid rolls and thousands on voter rolls.
Despite being a major problem for many millions of Americans, there is little research about the impact of illegal immigration on identity theft.
A comprehensive investigation published by the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) found potentially 39 million cases from 2012 to 2016 in which Americans had their identities and Social Security numbers stolen by illegal aliens.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
