IRS disclosed 47,000 taxpayers' addresses to ICE under an April 2025 data-sharing deal, later found unlawful in 42,695 cases

On August 7, 2025, the Internal Revenue Service disclosed the last-known addresses of approximately 47,000 taxpayers to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, responding to a June 27, 2025 ICE request covering 1.28 million taxpayer records. The disclosure came under an April 7, 2025 memorandum of understanding between the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security, signed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, allowing ICE to submit names and addresses of people it suspects are in the country illegally for cross-verification against IRS tax records. IRS Code 6103, one of the strictest confidentiality statutes in federal law, permits such disclosures only when ICE's request specifies the correct "address of the taxpayer" and the IRS confirms the request meets the statute's requirements before releasing the information. The agreement was controversial from the outset: the IRS's then-acting commissioner, Melanie Krause, resigned the day after it was signed rather than implement it.

Of the roughly 47,000 addresses disclosed on August 7, only 4,594 (9.7%) were properly matched by address. The remaining 42,695 (90.3%) were released through an automated Taxpayer Identification Number-matching process that never independently verified the addresses ICE had supplied, despite Section 6103's requirement that the IRS confirm the request specified the correct address before disclosing it. That gap between what the law required and what the IRS's automated process actually checked is what a federal court later found unlawful.

Updates

2025-11-21 — Federal judge preliminarily enjoined further IRS-ICE data transfers [7]

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly granted a preliminary injunction barring the IRS from further sharing taxpayer address information with ICE, finding the August 7 disclosures likely violated Section 6103(i)(2) and the Administrative Procedure Act. The order stayed the April 2025 agreement pending further proceedings.

2026-02-11 — IRS admitted in a court declaration that 42,695 of the disclosures were unlawful [8, 9]

IRS Chief Risk and Control Officer Dottie Romo filed a declaration acknowledging that of the 47,289 taxpayer records the IRS matched and disclosed to ICE, 42,695 (90.3%) were released through the automated process without independently verifying the addresses ICE had supplied, and that the IRS "provided confidential taxpayer information even when DHS officials could not provide sufficient data to positively identify a specific individual." The filing gave the first specific accounting of the scale of the August 7 disclosure's deficiencies.

2026-02-26 — District court issued indicative ruling confirming the finding [2, 3]

Judge Kollar-Kotelly issued an order on whether to supplement the appellate record with the Romo declaration while the case was on appeal to the D.C. Circuit, writing that the IRS's admission "confirms the Court's [prior] finding" that the IRS had violated Section 6103 "approximately 42,695 times." The order was procedural -- addressing what the appellate record should contain -- rather than a new factual finding, but it was the first public confirmation of the 42,695 figure tied to the court's own language, which is how this development was initially reported.

2026-09-08 — D.C. Circuit affirmed the injunction, calling the government's argument "weak sauce" [10, 11, 12, 13]

A three-judge D.C. Circuit panel affirmed Judge Kollar-Kotelly's preliminary injunction, ruling that the IRS's justification for the August 2025 disclosures was legally deficient and rejecting the government's objection to the injunction's prior-notice requirement as "weak sauce." The panel wrote that "the IRS is now on notice twice over regarding the inadequacies of its summer 2025 disclosures" and that the government and its personnel "face steep civil and criminal consequences for willful disclosure of information in violation of section 6103."