The Civic Node

Data of thousands of taxpayers wrongly shared with DHS, court filing says

4 min read

Original source

Summary

A court declaration filed February 11, 2026 by IRS Chief Risk and Control Officer Dottie Romo states that the IRS erroneously shared the taxpayer information of thousands of people with DHS as part of an April 2025 data-sharing agreement signed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. ICE submitted 1.28 million names; the IRS verified ~47,000; the IRS gave ICE additional address information for less than 5% of those individuals — potentially violating taxpayer-data privacy rules. A Massachusetts federal court has now ordered the IRS to stop sharing residential addresses with ICE; an earlier November 2025 federal court ruling blocked the IRS from sharing information with DHS, finding that earlier disclosure was illegal.

Key Points

  • The agreement: April 2025, signed by Bessent and Noem; allows ICE to submit names/addresses of immigrants in U.S. illegally to IRS for tax-record cross-verification
  • The numbers: 1.28 million names submitted by ICE → ~47,000 verified by IRS → ~2,350 received additional address information (less than 5%)
  • The error: For those <5%, IRS provided additional address data potentially violating privacy rules created to protect taxpayer data
  • Treasury notification: Romo states Treasury notified DHS in January of the error and requested DHS “promptly take steps to remediate the matter consistent with federal law,” including “appropriate disposal of any data provided to ICE by IRS based on incomplete or insufficient address information”
  • MA federal court: Ordered IRS to stop sharing residential addresses with ICE
  • Nov 2025 federal court: Blocked IRS from sharing information with DHS; found IRS illegally disseminated migrant tax data in summer 2025
  • Plaintiff: Public Citizen (filed lawsuit on behalf of immigrant rights groups shortly after the agreement was signed)
  • IRS did not respond to AP’s request for comment

Newsletter Angles

  • The IRS-DHS agreement is the parallel story to the records-preservation cover-up — both involve documented Trump-administration moves to weaken legal firewalls around taxpayer/citizen data, both are now in active federal litigation, and both have produced specific factual admissions of legal violations.
  • The 1.28M / 47K / 2.35K funnel is a structural data point — even at the optimistic end, the IRS was being asked to mass-verify migrant data far beyond what its records could actually identify. The “wrongly shared” question is downstream of the question why this funnel was set up in the first place.
  • The Bessent/Noem signature line is the cross-departmental coordination that mirrors the Bovino-Lewandowski reporting line — Treasury and DHS signed a joint agreement in April 2025 (same month DHS disabled the text-archive system; same month watchdog teams were ousted). That month is starting to look like the structural foundation of the second-Trump-administration records architecture.
  • The Public Citizen plaintiffs’ position quote is the article’s frame: “this breach of confidential information was part of the reason we filed our lawsuit in the first place” — the breach validates the predicted harm.

Entities Mentioned

Concepts Mentioned

Quotes

“This breach of confidential information was part of the reason we filed our lawsuit in the first place. Sharing this private taxpayer data creates chaos and, as we’ve seen this past year, if federal agents use this private information to track down individuals, it can endanger lives.” — Lisa Gilbert, Public Citizen

“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. The disclosure of thousands of confidential records unfortunately shows precisely why strict legal firewalls exist and have — until now — been treated as an important guardrail.” — Tom Bowman, Center for Democracy & Technology

Notes

AP wire reporting via PBS. The core factual claims (1.28M names, 47K verified, <5% address info) are anchored to a specific court declaration by IRS Chief Risk and Control Officer Dottie Romo, filed Feb 11. Washington Post broke the story first. For any article citing this, the legal-firewall framing is documented but the specific question of how many of the <5% additional-address disclosures led to actual ICE enforcement actions is not yet documented in this source — that would need follow-up reporting or a FOIA.

Graph View

Backlinks