A federal judge on Nov. 21 ordered the Internal Revenue Service not to share tax return information that immigration officials want to use for the deportation of illegal immigrants.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction against the IRS after determining that the groups that brought the lawsuit had legal standing to sue. The lawsuit, known as Center for Taxpayer Rights v. Internal Revenue Service, is ongoing.
Standing refers to the right of someone to sue in court. The parties must show a strong enough connection to the claims to justify their participation in a lawsuit.
Kollar-Kotelly said in her written opinion that the plaintiffs “have shown a substantial likelihood” that an inter-agency agreement allowing the sharing of the information is “unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act.”
The Administrative Procedure Act is a federal statute enacted in 1946 that governs administrative law procedures for federal executive departments and independent agencies. The late U.S. Sen. Pat McCarran (D-Nev.) said the law was “a bill of rights for the hundreds of thousands of Americans whose affairs are controlled or regulated in one way or another by agencies of the federal government.”
The lawsuit was filed by the Center for Taxpayer Rights, a nonprofit that offers tax advice to low-income Americans, an association of small businesses, as well as two labor unions.
The plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit “have shown that the IRS’s disclosure of confidential taxpayer address information to ICE was contrary to law because it did not comply with certain requirements in Internal Revenue Code Section 6103(i)(2),” Kollar-Kotelly said.
Although the IRS said it was complying with that taxpayer-protection provision of the Internal Revenue Code, the judge said, “The IRS’s unlawful conduct has created a substantial likelihood that Plaintiffs and their members will suffer irreparable harm.”
The opinion stated that the plaintiffs alleged that the IRS moved away from its long-standing policy of strictly protecting confidential taxpayer information and adopted a new policy that placed a priority on large-scale sharing of such information between government agencies. The IRS entered into an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in April 2025 to share such information and handed over to the immigration agency address information for about 47,000 taxpayers.
“As a basis for its decision to transfer this information to ICE, the IRS relied on a representation from ICE that a single individual at ICE was ‘personally and directly engaged’ in more than one million criminal investigations or proceedings,” according to the judge.
The plaintiffs have shown that the IRS’s implementation of the address-sharing policy was “arbitrary and capricious because the IRS failed to acknowledge and explain its departure from its prior policy of strict confidentiality, failed to consider the reliance interests that were engendered by its prior policy of strict confidentiality, and failed to provide a reasoned explanation for implementing the new Address-Sharing Policy,” the judge wrote in the opinion.
Reliance interests are expectations that are based on existing legal rules and court precedents. These interests serve to create a bias in favor of maintaining the status quo. Courts are sometimes reluctant to take action that interferes with reliance interests.
Democracy Forward Foundation, which represents the plaintiffs, hailed the new court ruling.
“The privacy laws enacted in the post-Watergate era exist to prevent abuses of power like this and yet leaders in the IRS and ICE launched this effort,” Skye Perryman, the foundation’s president and CEO, said in a statement.
“Paying your taxes does not forfeit your right to privacy.”
U.S. Department of Justice spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre declined to comment on the new ruling.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared Nov. 21, 2025, in The Epoch Times. It was updated Nov. 23, 2025.