Another IRS Commissioner Steps Down After Being Forced To Share Immigrant Tax Records With The DHS

Legal Issues

from the replacing-talent-with-loyalty dept

Away goes more talent. And away goes another obstacle standing in the way of Kristi Noem’s DHS and Donald Trump’s plans to rid this country of as many immigrants as inhumanely possible.

One acting commissioner — one with 38 years experience — has already resigned because of the DHS’s desire to use tax records as a migrant-hunting database. What began as a request for “only” 700,000 records has ballooned to a demand for seven million tax records — a number that would encompass nearly two-thirds of the eleven million immigrants currently living in the United States.

Acting commissioner Melanie Krause has chosen to walk, rather than be a part of this horrific mass vanishing of migrants, despite initially showing some willingness to cooperate with the Trump administration’s demands.

The acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service is resigning over a deal to share immigrants’ tax data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the purpose of identifying and deporting people illegally in the U.S., according to two people familiar with the decision.

Melanie Krause, who had served as acting head since February, will step down over the new data-sharing document signed Monday by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The agreement will allow ICE to submit names and addresses of immigrants inside the U.S. illegally to the IRS for cross-verification against tax records.

Not only have two consecutive acting commissioners resigned over this single, focused effort to turn normally confidential tax records into just another way for the government to inflict pain on migrants who not only have jobs but pay taxes, but the administration’s desire to stock its cabinet shelves with loyalists has resulted in the dismissal of IRS lawyers who expressed their concerns about the legality of this request.

Acting chief counsel William Paul was removed from his role at the agency last month and replaced by Andrew De Mello, an attorney in the chief counsel’s office who is deemed supportive of DOGE, according to two other people familiar with the plans who were also not authorized to speak publicly.

Since there’s no one left at the IRS with the power to sign this agreement, Trump loyalist/Treasury Department secretary/hedge fund billionaire Scott Bessent signed it himself, clearing the way for ICE and other DHS components to raid the IRS for information they can use to identify the horrible criminals who are dutifully paying their taxes year after year.

And yet, ICE continues to pretend catching taxpayers paying taxes is a great way to find undocumented immigrants who are exploiting the system.

Todd Lyons, acting ICE director, told reporters at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix on Tuesday that the agreement will help ICE find people who are collecting benefits they aren’t entitled to and are “kind of hiding in plain sight” using someone else’s identity.

Hilarious. I mean, it would be if it wasn’t so horribly stupid, dangerous, and inhumane. Pulling legit tax records isn’t going to do much to reveal those “hiding in plain sight.” But that’s not even the point, even if that’s the public-facing argument being made by Director Lyons. The real point is to identify and locate any immigrant so the DHS, ICE, and others can use literally any reason to expel them from this country and deposit them anywhere in the world other governments are willing to take them, even if it means imprisoning innocent people in jails filled with truly dangerous criminals.

The IRS is now fully complicit with this atrocity. At least a few career officials have made it clear they’d rather be jobless than be part of Trump’s assault on humanity.

Filed Under: cbp, dhs, ice, immigration, irs, tax records, treasury department, trump administration