UPDATE: At a court hearing on Wednesday challenging the legality of the ICE and IRS agreement, the judge did not put a pause to the agreement while the case unfolded. The government did indicate that the parties have not yet finalized when the agreement will go into effect, according to a spokesperson for Public Citizen Litigation Group.
Two Illinois immigrant worker rights groups are part of the legal challenge to a data agreement between U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement and the Internal Revenue Service. Advocacy groups seek to stall the implementation of the agreement they say will help the Trump Administration with its deportation efforts.
The agreement between ICE and the IRS cites President Donald Trump’s order to - quote - “take immediate steps to identify, exclude, or remove aliens illegally present in the United States.”
Tax filings provide a trove of information, including an individual’s place of employment and home address.
Such information could greatly assist immigration enforcement efforts, said Cristobal Cavazos, the executive director of Solidaridad Immigrante DuPage, Immigrant Solidarity DuPage, for the purpose of “what Trump himself has said - essentially get rid of anybody without documents in this country."
The organization’s membership includes workers with and without legal authorization.
“We were out there working in these factories for minimum wage, so we're paying a disproportionate amount of taxes,” Cavazos said, “and that the Trump administration is trying to do this overreach in using the department of the IRS to go after us and to target us for deportation -- this is really what we mentioned in the suit.”
Studies find undocumented immigrants provide the government a source of revenue for social safety net programs that they themselves are barred from participating in.
“We can't tap into Social Security,” Cavazos said. “We have a lot of people, a disproportionate amount of people, with long COVID in our community with no health benefits. Essentially, we're shut out of everything.”
“The only right it seems we have,” he added, “is to pay our taxes.”
He said for years immigrant rights and advocacy groups have encouraged folks to file their taxes.
“If one day there's going to be an immigration reform,” he said, “we have to have our taxes in order.”
Undocumented Immigrants file their taxes with an ITIN -- that’s an individual tax identification number. It was created in 1996 to allow folks without work authorization and social security number to file their taxes, as required by law.
A Yale study estimates that unauthorized immigrants paid $66 billion in federal income and payroll taxes in 2023.
A 2024 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic policy found that undocumented immigrants paid nearly 100 billion dollars in taxes in 2022.
Nandan Joshi is with Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy nonprofit. He’s the lead attorney filing suit on behalf of immigrant worker groups challenging the data sharing agreement.
“The administration keeps calling everyone criminals,” said Joshi, “but these are people who are paying their taxes because that's what the law requires. Now they, [unauthorized immigrants] face the risk that the IRS will betray their trust.”
The group filed the lawsuit in partnership with Alan Morrison, Associate Dean for Public Interest and Public Service Law at George Washington University, and Raise the Floor Alliance. Joshi said a group from New Mexico and another from the Los Angeles area have also joined the lawsuit.
He said in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal when President Richard Nixon went after the tax records of his political enemies, Congress passed the Tax Reform Act establishing privacy protections for tax information.
“That's been the foundation for the US tax system for the last 50 years,” Joshi said, “which is that taxpayers can be assured when they pay their taxes, as they're required to do by law, and file their tax returns and provide all the sensitive information to the IRS that that information is going to be fully protected.”
The release of the IRS-ICE agreement includes large portions that have been blacked out. Still, it states that data will be shared for investigating “designated federal crime statute.”
“The government has been pretty silent about what their plans are,” Joshi said. “So, they say what they're going to do is lawful, but they're apparently afraid to tell people what they're going to do.”
Joshi said if ICE receives that data, it’s hard to reverse the damage. It will have implications well beyond creating fear in the immigrant community.
“Once they can breach that firewall between the IRS and other and law enforcement,” he said, “they can do that for citizens as well. Hopefully that can be stopped before it happens, but that's the risk that we face right now.”
He said the next scheduled court hearing is on Wednesday, when they will seek to get more information about the agreement, but ultimately, want the judge to halt it.
An attempt to stall the agreement with a lawsuit in March failed with the federal judge ruling the suit came too soon prior to the release of the agreement. During the appeal process, the government in its court filings included the “memorandum of understanding” between ICE and DHS.
