Appeals court upholds order blocking IRS from sharing taxpayer data with ICE

It’s a strange moment when the IRS suddenly wants to be helpful. For years, Americans have been told to cough up intensely personal financial details because the government promises, in writing and in practice, that tax information stays locked down. Now we’re told that same data should be piped over to ICE as a matter of policy, and a federal appeals court has said no, not like this.

We’re not blind to the argument on the other side. Enforcing immigration law is a real job, and the public has every right to expect the federal government to know who’s here and who isn’t. But the court didn’t block ICE from doing its job. It blocked the IRS from breaking a set of confidentiality rules that exist for a reason. If tax records become an all-purpose investigative toolbox, the incentive to be honest on your return drops, voluntary compliance drops, and the whole system gets more adversarial, more expensive, and less accurate.

There’s also a practical problem the “just share the data” crowd tends to ignore. Once Washington decides confidentiality is optional when the cause is popular, it won’t stop at immigration. Today it’s ICE. Tomorrow it’s another agency, another priority, another “special exception.” Conservatives spent years warning about mission creep in the federal bureaucracy. This is what it looks like in real life, with real people’s information.

If the administration wants tighter coordination between tax enforcement and immigration enforcement, it should do it the hard way: go to Congress and change the statute, narrowly and transparently, and take the political heat that comes with it. Shortcuts that rely on agencies reinterpreting long-standing privacy protections may feel satisfying in the moment, but they’re the kind of move that makes Americans trust the government less. And that’s a price we don’t need to pay.