by Mitti Hicks
February 27, 2026
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said in her ruling that the agency violated IRS Code 6103, which is reportedly one of the strictest confidentiality laws in federal law.
A federal judge ruled Thursday that the IRS violated the law by sharing confidential taxpayer information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) about 43,695 times.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the IRS mistakenly shared people’s taxpayer information with the Department of Homeland Security and immigration officials. This is part of a controversial agreement to share information about immigrants as part of the Trump administration’s priority to deport people illegally here in the United States.
According to the Associated Press, the judge’s decision was based on a statement from Dottie Romo, the IRS’s chief risk and control officer. The statement shows that the IRS provided DHS officials with information about about 47,000 of the 1.28 million people requested by ICE. In most cases, ICE provided additional address information, violating privacy rules protecting taxpayer information.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly said in her ruling that the agency violated IRS Code 6103, which is reportedly one of the strictest confidentiality laws in federal law.
“Not only did the IRS fail to ensure that ICE’s request for confidential tax address information complied with legal requirements, but this failure also resulted in the IRS releasing confidential tax addresses to ICE in situations where ICE’s request for that information was manifestly deficient,” she wrote.
The IRS and DHS enter into immigration agreements using taxpayer information
Last April, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem signed an agreement that would allow ICE to submit names and addresses of immigrants living in the United States illegally. The authorities would compare the information with the tax documents. It was an agreement that led to the resignation of the then-acting IRS commissioner. Several ongoing cases challenge the IRS-DHS agreement.
The agreement’s critics face an uphill battle. Earlier this week, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declined to issue a preliminary injunction for an immigrant rights group that had sued the federal government to stop the agreement.
Judge Harry T. Edwards wrote in his ruling that nonprofit groups are “unlikely to succeed on their claims” because IRS privacy rules do not cover the information disclosed by the agencies, WSLS reports.
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