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By Dan Gooding
Associate News Editor
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A federal judge ruled Thursday that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had illegally shared nearly 43,000 addresses with U.S. immigration officials, as part of a wider effort to share data across the federal government.
The information was shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), despite rules meant to limit this access when there is not enough information, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said.
"In other words, the IRS not only failed to ensure that ICE’s request for confidential taxpayer address information met the statutory requirements, but this failure led the IRS to disclose confidential taxpayer addresses to ICE in situations where ICE’s request for that information was patently deficient," the judge wrote.
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The ruling came as part of a case in which Kollar-Kotelly had already prohibited the data sharing in November, a decision the Trump administration has taken to the Court of Appeals in Washington.
Newsweek reached out to the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security for comment via email Thursday afternoon.
Why It Matters
The Trump administration has moved to allow more data sharing between federal departments and agencies over the past year, as part of immigration enforcement efforts. The reasoning for the increased sharing has been to root out immigration fraud and locate alleged illegal immigrants, but critics have warned that many government datasets are incomplete, potentially leading to legal immigrants and even citizens being put at risk of detention.
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What To Know
The Center for Taxpayer Rights sued the IRS last year, following an agreement signed in April 2025 by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, as part of broader federal efforts to identify people subject to immigration enforcement and carry out removal orders.
The Washington Post first reported the data disclosure at the center of this case, citing three people familiar with the matter who said it appeared to breach legal safeguards protecting taxpayer data and was only recently discovered.
The IRS later confirmed the reporting in a court filing earlier in February, with chief risk and control officer Dottie Romo saying in a sworn declaration that the agency shared confidential taxpayer information even when the DHS lacked sufficient data to identify specific people positively.
In the filing, Romo said the agency received requests for 1.28 million names from ICE. The IRS was able to verify about 47,000 of those names. For a portion of those verified people, about 5 percent, the IRS provided additional address details that may have violated federal confidentiality protections for tax records.
Reacting to that disclosure in her ruling Thursday, Kollar-Kotelly said the IRS violated its own Internal Revenue Code but acknowledged that it was the federal government that had given more transparency on the issue.
What People Are Saying
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, in her ruling: "...the IRS provided confidential taxpayer addresses to ICE in response to requests from ICE that the IRS now admits were legally deficient. The Court’s prior decision to indicate that it would supplement the record on appeal with the Romo Declaration reflects the significance of this new information."
Tom Bowman, policy counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology, previously said in a statement shared with Newsweek: "This privacy failure is a stark reminder of why safeguards for sensitive data are so critical. The improper sharing of taxpayer data is unsafe, unlawful, and subject to serious criminal penalties. Once taxpayer data is opened to immigration enforcement, mistakes are inevitable and the consequences fall on innocent people."
What Happens Next
Legal battles around the agreement continue.
Update 2/26/26, 2:52 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
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