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UNITED STATES – MARCH 4: President Donald Trump arrives to deliver his address to a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, March 4, 2025 (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images).
The Trump administration‘s decision to share Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is resulting in both internal fractures and outside criticism.
On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem signed an agreement that will allow ICE agents to cross-reference the names of immigrants against tax records. Those efforts are in service of plans to ramp up deportations of people in the country without proper documentation.
On Tuesday, reports surfaced in multiple media outlets that Acting IRS Commissioner Melanie Krause was on her way out – meaning the beleaguered agency will soon have its fourth chief in as many months.
Krause accepted a deferred-resignation offer, a form of retirement available to many federal employees, and is slated to leave on April 28, according to the Wall Street Journal. The decision to leave is based on her concerns over recent Trump administration actions – and her lack of ability to affect those actions, the newspaper reported, citing an anonymous person said to be familiar with Krause’s decision-making.
As her departure made waves, some reports suggested — and some reports outright stated — that Krause was specifically calling it quits over the data-sharing agreement between the IRS and DHS.
The IRS, for its part, wished Krause well.
“Melanie Krause has been leading the IRS through a time of extraordinary change,” a spokesperson told ABC News. “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.”
Less guesswork was involved as tax law experts appraised the development that precipitated Krause’s looming career shift.
“It will be challenging for the IRS to confirm identities based solely on a name and address, potentially resulting in many false positives,” the NYU Tax Law Center wrote on its official blog. “The IRS might ‘confirm’ that someone with the given name lives at a particular address, only for them to be entirely unrelated to the investigation but simply have the same common name. Or DHS might go to an address the IRS ‘confirmed’ but that is in fact outdated (because, e.g., the person in question moved since filing a tax return) and arrest the current resident instead.”
The think tank framed the interagency synergy in the context of the recent deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father who was shipped off to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
In an atypical courtroom admission last week, a government lawyer with 15 years of experience at the U.S. Department of Justice admitted: “Mr. Abrego Garcia should not have been removed.” The deportation was later chalked up to as an “administrative error.” While the judge overseeing the case blasted the deportation as “an illegal act,” the concession quickly resulted in the lawyer being fired.
The legal experts at New York University say Abrego’s case is not just a cautionary tale – but likely portends repetition due to the data-sharing agreement between the IRS and DHS.
“Cases where mistaken administrative work results in wrongful arrest, deportation, or imprisonment are not unheard of — and the U.S. may see many more ‘administrative errors,”” the post continued.
Calling the agreement “unprecedented and troubling,” those experts said the agreement could also pose problems for nonimmigrants.
“In addition to the grave impact on those who might be wrongfully deported, the agreement threatens to violate the rights that many more Americans have under longstanding laws that protect their tax information from wrongful disclosure or dissemination,” the organization said. “In fact, it is difficult to see how the IRS could release information to DHS while complying with taxpayer privacy statutes, given what DHS is reportedly requesting, the limited information in the requests, and DHS’s track record of errors when it comes to ‘identifying’ information.”
The post, titled, “IRS-DHS Agreement to Share Taxpayer Information Would Create Significant Risks to All Taxpayers,” goes on to envision a litany of legal violations that might result from the plan.
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In March, a 23-page lawsuit alleging Administrative Procedure Act violations was filed in a Washington, D.C., federal court over the “impending” data-sharing agreement between the IRS and DHS.
