The Internal Revenue Service will start sharing immigrants’ tax data with the Department of Homeland Security, in a deal reached this week, which is a huge departure from the IRS’s usual policy of keeping most tax filings confidential unless a court approves sharing them with law enforcement in a specific criminal investigation. The new agreement, signed Monday by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, is more about allowing DHS to go fishing around in IRS records to find people who are in the USA without authorization.
NPR reports that it’s not clear when DHS will start sifting through tax records, so we assume it already is. But don’t worry, the Trump administration says this will all be very cool and very legal, like every other abuse Team Trump has ever perpetrated.
Under the terms of the deal, ICE officers can ask the IRS for information about immigrants who have final orders of removal or are under criminal investigation — including for the crime of failing to leave the country after 90 days.
Oh, and also the operation is so super-secret that the Memorandum of Understanding is heavily redacted, “making it difficult to understand exactly what the IRS has agreed to share.” But again, no need for concern. Who ever heard of a president trying to use the IRS for illegal purposes, other than Richard Nixon and probably others, including those times when Donald Trump The First reportedly mused about siccing the IRS on his enemies?
By complete coincidence we’re sure, (acting) IRS Commissioner Melanie Krause will be resigning just six weeks into her job, according to insiders who know things. That will make her the third head of the IRS to step down since Trump took office on January 20.
In addition, several other top IRS people, “including the agency’s chief financial, privacy and risk officers, are also planning to leave,” Politico reports. The IRS has already seen the same wave of DOGE mass firings and job cuts as others under Trump, which is projected to lead to less revenue coming in to pay for government operations.
Why yes, Tax Day is still April 15, and the agency will be losing a lot of its leadership during its busiest time of the year. Happily, processing returns has become so automated that shouldn’t be a problem, unless of course something goes wrong and it turns out that everyone who knew how to run the agency’s computers got shitcanned. Maybe Elon’s AI can make up a solution.
Before Krause said she’d be leaving, the IRS lost two other leaders: Joe Biden’s IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel resigned on Inauguration Day, with three years left in his term, and then his successor, (acting) Commissioner Doug O’Donnell, a veteran IRS official of four decades, retired because the place was being demolished by Trump and DOGE. So far, the job has been less stable than being a first-term Trump chief of staff or a drummer for Spın̈al Tap.
Ms. Krause hasn’t been answering press inquiries about her decision to leave the agency she just started running, although a Treasury Department spox confirmed that Krause plans to leave, and that she had taken one of the “leave or be fired” buyout offers that DOGE is so proud of using to eliminate government workers.
In typical Regime Style, the statement said nothing about why she’s leaving, but framed her remarkably speedy departure as part of what makes Great Leader so perfect, insisting that Krause
has been leading the IRS through a time of extraordinary change. As we focus on IT modernization and re-organize the agency to better serve the taxpayer, we are also in the midst of breaking down data silos that for too long have stood in the way of identifying waste, fraud, and abuse and bringing criminals to justice. We believe these goals are critical to a more efficient government and safer country. We wish Melanie well on her next endeavor,
This is where we point out once again that while the IRS has always gone after tax cheats, it’s now letting immigration agents (or maybe DOGEboys, nobody knows) trawl through taxpayer data with the aim of using it to disappear people who filed tax returns under the assumption that their information would be kept private, and only be used to collect their taxes.
That’s because until now, the IRS routinely assured undocumented taxpayers that their data would be kept private. The IRS has long allowed undocumented folks as well as many foreign nationals who are in the country legally to file using an “Individual Taxpayer Identification Number” (ITIN) instead of a Social Security number. (SSNs are only for citizens and permanent legal residents.)
If you have better reading comprehension than a MAGA idiot on Twitter, you can see why simply scooping up everyone who files using an ITIN wouldn’t guarantee you’d only be arresting people here illegally, because you’d also be grabbing people working on temporary permits, or academics, or students, or other categories of folks here legally. Haha, not that the distinction will matter anymore.
Now, there is at least an ironic bit of truth coming out from this whole ugly mess, which is that it shines a light on the fact that millions of undocumented immigrants have been paying billions of dollars of taxes — around $100 billion in income taxes annually. On top of that, they pay state and local taxes, plus additional billions every year, through withholding, into Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment, none of which undocumented taxpayers can ever make use of unless they attain legal status. They’re literally subsidizing Americans’ benefits, not leeching off the system.
Trump, of course, sneers at the very idea that undocumented people are anything but a burden to America, because as we all know they take all the jobs but are simultaneously on welfare, which again they don’t qualify for. While campaigning for his first term, he asked, “Do you really believe they pay taxes?” Never mind the copious data showing that they do, because who ever heard of rapists and murderers and gang members (the only jobs immigrants have unless Trump hired them to work at his trash palaces) paying taxes?
In conclusion, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about from the merger of IRS and ICE, unless a DOGE algorithm says you have done something wrong and you end up with a hood over your head, the end.
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See You In Guantanamo! That Man Now Openly Fantasizing About Sending US Citizens To Foreign Prisons.
[NPR / ABC News / Politico / Combating Nativist Narratives]
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