Court documents reveal ICE request for nearly 1.3 million taxpayer records

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement asked the IRS to share with it the data of nearly 1.3 million taxpayers, according to court filings released this week.

Defendants in Center for Taxpayer Rights v. Internal Revenue Service released a massive trove of documents late Wednesday as part of Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s directive requiring the production of the administrative record prior to any decisions she makes on the plaintiffs’ claims of Administrative Procedure Act violations.

The lawsuit, which initially sought to cut off DOGE access to IRS IT systems, now centers on ICE’s data-sharing agreement with the tax agency. The newly released documents show that ICE requested more than 1.27 million records, including personally identifiable information such as names, dates of birth, addresses, fingerprint identification numbers and more.

Of those million-plus taxpayers, 47,489 were deemed to be matches for individuals ICE sought. An Aug. 6 email from Kenneth Kies, assistant secretary of the Treasury for tax policy, advised then-IRS Commissioner Billy Long to direct IRS Chief Information Officer Kaschit Pandya to disclose the matches to “the appropriate point of contact at ICE” via Kiteworks, a private data-sharing network.

“There is no need for a press release or broad disclosure of the fact that this information is being provided and the MOU does not discuss any publicizing of the disclosure,” Kies wrote.

The following day, Long made the request of Pandya. One day later, Long was ousted from his role. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been serving as acting IRS commissioner ever since.

Prior to the vast data request from ICE in August, the court documents reveal pointed questioning about the legality of the data-sharing pact in February by Douglas O’Donnell, who served as acting commissioner before retiring that month.  

In a Feb. 21 email to Daniel Katz, a top adviser to Bessent, O’Donnell attached a document and shared legal analysis that he said came to the “conclusion that we cannot provide information responsive to the request made.” 

In April, O’Donnell’s successor, Melanie Krause, also resigned from her role over objections to the data-sharing deal. That agreement has sparked strenuous pushback from a variety of advocacy groups.

Maddy Gitomer, senior counsel at Democracy Forward — which represents the Center for Taxpayer Rights, Main Street Alliance, the National Federation of Federal Employees and the Communications Workers of America in the case — said in an email that the Trump administration’s “ongoing rush” to pursue this policy “will have disastrous consequences if not stopped urgently.”

“After the Watergate scandal, Congress passed laws to protect sensitive taxpayer information that have been upheld for decades,” Gitomer wrote. “Now, the Trump-Vance administration is unlawfully facilitating the bulk data sharing of taxpayer information with ICE. The dangers posed by these disclosures are real, imminent threats to core privacy rights.”

The release of the documents comes ahead of a Monday deadline for plaintiff objections to the administrative record. Judge Kollar-Kotelly issued an order last month requiring the IRS to provide the court and plaintiffs with 24 hours notice if the tax agency shared substantial amounts of taxpayer data with ICE again. 

The Department of Justice last week disclosed a Customs and Border Protection request to the IRS for “corporate return information” linked to tariffs. The DOJ said it did not believe the request fell “within the ambit of the Court’s order,” but it made the disclosure anyway, “out of an abundance of caution.”

Bloomberg Law and Politico were first to report on the new court filings.