Who could have seen this coming?
On Feb. 20 last year, I broke the news with my Washington Post colleagues that immigration enforcement officials hoped to get confidential tax data from the Internal Revenue Service to help locate, detain and deport suspected undocumented immigrants.
By most mainstream legal standards, complying with the ask violated taxpayer privacy laws. It was also impractical. Shortly after we reported the story, sources started lighting up my phone saying there was very little chance the IRS could share this data without implicating the wrong taxpayers.
Well, here we are.
The IRS did it anyway. And then it shared data on thousands of the wrong taxpayers with immigration enforcement officials, I scooped with colleagues Jeff Stein and Perry Stein (no relation between the Steins).
@jacobbogage NEWS: The IRS may have given away your tax data to ICE. I jumped on @msnow with Chris Jansing to talk it out. #news #fyp
There’s a few reasons why this happened, per sources.
First, DHS’s tracking systems on undocumented immigrants are very poor. Not all are set up to conform to naming customs in Latin and Hispanic cultures. Undocumented folks also frequently live on the margins of society without access to some of the same institutions as other U.S. residents. That makes it harder for the government to track them.
Second, the IRS is not built to do this work. The IRS is built to collect tax revenue and issue tax credits. Immigration enforcement is not its thing.
Third, the IRS is built to protect taxpayer privacy. But, as we reported, the agency’s privacy department was sidelined on the project with DHS in favor of the IT team, which had largely been taken over by the U.S. DOGE Service.
After we reported our story, the IRS and DHS were forced to cop to what happened in federal courts.
I still have many questions:
How specifically did these errors occur?
Who was warned about them, and why did they blow past those warnings?
When did the IRS and DHS learn about this?
Why did they wait until after our report to disclose it?
Will the people whose tax information was shared with DHS be notified that their rights were violated? Those people are entitled by law to sue the U.S. government and recover substantial monetary damages.
When and how will those notifications take place?
Did DHS erase the information that the IRS improperly shared? How can we be sure?
Did anyone at DHS access that information? Again, how can we be sure?
I want to hear your questions, too.
Email me at [email protected] and contact me securely on Signal at jacobbogage.87. And follow me on Bluesky: @jacobbogage.bsky.social.
