For decades, the Internal Revenue Service has made taxpayer confidentiality a high priority, including strictly restricting the access of other federal agencies to its billions of returns. IRS leaders made it clear to undocumented individuals who don’t “hide in the shadows” and pay their taxes — using an individual taxpayer identification number instead of a Social Security number — that this guarantee of confidentiality extended to them.
Nearly 4 million such IDs were used to file returns in 2022, yielding an estimated $66 billion in federal taxes. About two-thirds of that sum was withheld through the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare, which are closed to undocumented immigrants. Given the long-term funding issues facing these programs, this $43 billion annual infusion — from undocumented people who might not be expected to provide it — is appreciated by the federal government.
Or at least it used to be. This week, the IRS and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency formally confirmed that ICE would begin having access to IRS information about individuals being investigated by ICE for possible deportation. This arrangement has already triggered immense upheaval at the IRS because of its seeming illegality under federal law and the promises it breaks. Acting IRS Commissioner Melanie Krause is the latest official to resign in protest.
Contrary to initial assumptions that ICE would use this access only to target individuals who had already been ordered to leave the U.S., officials haven’t challenged a report that the agency believes it will be able to use once-confidential IRS data to deport about 7 million people.
This will no doubt please the many Americans who want strict immigration enforcement and voted for Donald Trump to give it to them. They applaud the end to the Biden istration’s unprecedented policies that led to an explosion in newly arrived undocumented immigrants.
But the IRS-ICE collaboration takes on a different dimension when it is seen as only part of a range of White House decisions to use government power to target disfavored individuals and groups — former government officials who refuted Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen, law firms who challenged his edicts and news organizations whose reporting he didn’t like. Consider the reports this week that the istration is monitoring immigrants’ social media activities for antisemitism and may strip visas and benefits from those expressing constitutionally protected views. Would anyone be surprised if the White House began monitoring all Americans’ social media to chill opposition to tax cuts? Criticism of Elon Musk? Skepticism about a U.S. takeover of Greenland?
Don’t scoff. It wasn’t progressives suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome” who said he considered Americans like California Democrat Adam Schiff to be “the enemies from within” — it was Trump himself. When even a Fox News interviewer told him last October that this view of his critics sounded “pretty ominous,” he pushed back: “I think it’s accurate.”
To be sure, elected officials’ abuse of power is nothing new. President Richard Nixon had an enemies list with the explicit goal of using “the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” But when this was revealed in June 1973, it triggered bipartisan revulsion and was a factor in Nixon leaving office 14 months later.
Now we have a president bragging about and defending his enemies’ list — not hiding it. This is not progress. It is the opposite.
