Democrats urge appeals court to keep block on ICE from using IRS data

A bicameral group of Democrats urged a federal appeals court to uphold a lower-court ruling that blocked U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement from using or viewing taxpayer addresses it obtained via its data-sharing agreement with the IRS.

In an amicus brief filed Thursday, 85 Senate and House Democrats argued that the IRS-ICE pact violated section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code — the provision that safeguards taxpayers’ privacy.

In brokering the IRS-ICE deal, the Trump administration reversed decades of precedent denying the use of taxpayer information in immigration enforcement, according to the brief, which was led by members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Noncitizens have long been encouraged to pay taxes, with the assurance that their privacy would be protected.

“The data sharing here was illegal and threatens federal revenue, adversely affecting all taxpayers,” the lawmakers wrote. “It would also compromise taxpayer privacy and raise the possibility of grave consequences for individuals misidentified by ICE, chill participation in the tax system, impact our constituents, and destroy public trust.”  

The amicus brief, filed in Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts v. Bessent, will be considered by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit following a ruling by Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts to provide preliminary relief to the plaintiffs.

Signers of the brief — including Sens. Alex Padilla of California and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York, chair of the CHC — emphasized the broken contract between the IRS and noncitizen taxpayers, who took the tax agency “at its word” and applied for an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number that ICE then “unlawfully” used for enforcement purposes.

“Those assurances drew millions of taxpayers into the federal tax system, generating billions of dollars in revenue,” the brief stated. “The IRS reversed course without assessing the foreseeable harms to voluntary compliance, the public fisc, and trust in the tax system.”

The change in the IRS’s data-sharing policy, the lawmakers argued, amounted to an “arbitrary and capricious” action that violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs agency rule-marking. 

“The district court’s preliminary injunction preserves Congress’s unambiguous command that taxpayer information remain confidential unless and until an agency lawfully satisfies the conditions set forth by Congress and longstanding IRS policy,” the brief concluded.

The IRS-ICE data-sharing agreement has been the subject of other lawsuits. In one case, a federal judge ruled that the tax agency broke the law more than 40,000 times by sharing addresses with the Department of Homeland Security component. 

A June watchdog report, meanwhile, found that ICE hadn’t met data safeguarding standards before the agency inked the April 2025 memorandum of understanding with the IRS.

The new filing is the fifth brief led by CHC members as part of various litigation over the IRS-ICE deal. 

“Unlike two earlier cases, which addressed the data-sharing agreement and how the IRS carried it out, this is the only case in which a court has actually barred ICE from using taxpayer data already in its possession,” a press release from Padilla’s office noted.