On February 5, 2026, a Massachusetts federal judge issued an order staying information-sharing between the IRS and ICE, as well as a preliminary injunction prohibiting Kristi Noem, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, acting-Director Todd Lyons, and any DHS and ICE agent from “inspecting, viewing, using, copying, distributing, relying on, or otherwise acting upon any return information that had been obtained from or disclosed by the IRS” through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that was signed between the two agencies on April 7, 2025. The MOU was designed with the purpose of “sharing of tax information across agencies to implement President Trump’s direction that DHS ‘take immediate steps to identify, exclude, or remove aliens illegally present in the United States.’”
In addition, the court found that the storage of the taxpayer data on an unnamed ICE employee’s computer, “constitutes impermissible storage” of the data “in contravention” of the Internal Revenue Code. The court ordered that the defendants provide a copy of the order to the employee “whose government-issued computer holds the information received from the IRS on August 7, 2025,” and required that ICE confirm that the order was delivered to that individual by February 10, 2026. The court held that “Plaintiffs have established a high likelihood that ICE’s handling, use, and storage of taxpayer addresses violated and continues to violate” the Internal Revenue Code.
The facts behind the lawsuit are that following the execution of the MOU between the IRS and ICE, ICE requested the data of almost 1.3 million taxpayers on August 6, 2025, and the IRS provided taxpayer information of 47,000 individuals that matched the ICE request on August 7, 2025. That data has been stored and used by ICE since August 7, 2025.
The court stated that the disclosure of taxpayer data from the IRS to ICE was contrary to Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code which “strictly prohibits the disclosure” of taxpayer data to government agencies, private entities, or citizens, which taxpayers rely upon when filing their taxes. The court further noted that “the Internal Revenue Code provides strong privacy protections for information submitted by taxpayers and/or obtained by the IRS.”
The court found that the plaintiffs sufficiently demonstrated irreparable harm and that they have “been and will continue to be harmed by the data-sharing due to the erosion of trust between the organizations and their members.”
We have outlined numerous privacy concerns about how taxpayer and other data have been shared between federal agencies in this administration, including the actions of the Department of Government Efficiency a/k/a DOGE.. These issues will continue to be litigated, and we will update you on court rulings as they progress.
[View source.]
