IRS, White House clashed over immigrants' data before tax chief was ousted [View all]

Source: Washington Post

August 9, 2025 at 12:16 p.m. EDT


The Internal Revenue Service clashed with the White House over using tax data to help locate suspected undocumented immigrants hours before Trump administration officials forced IRS Commissioner Billy Long from his post Friday, according to two people familiar with the situation.

The Department of Homeland Security sent the IRS a list Thursday of 40,000 names of people DHS officials thought were in the country illegally and asked the IRS to use confidential taxpayer data to verify their addresses, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The Treasury Department, the parent agency of the IRS, and DHS agreed to an arrangement in April to facilitate such data sharing — over the objections of the tax service’s privacy lawyers.

DHS officials have suggested they’d eventually ask the IRS for help locating 7 million people. There are about 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, according to federal estimates. On Friday, though, the IRS responded that it was able to verify fewer than 3 percent of the names immigration enforcement officials submitted, the people said. The names the agency could match were mainly the individuals for whom DHS provided an individual taxpayer identification number. An ITIN is an IRS-specific ID that immigrants often use in place of a Social Security number on a tax filing.

Undocumented immigrants pay tens of billions of dollars in taxes each year, which the ITINs help facilitate. White House officials requested additional information on the taxpayers the IRS identified, the people said — specifically, if any of them had claimed the earned income tax credit, which can reduce the tax bill for some low-income filers. The IRS declined to provide that information, citing taxpayer privacy rights.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/08/09/trump-administration-irs-data-dispute/