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The IRS Is Building a System to Share Taxpayers' Data with ICE
- duxup 1y agoICE just seems to be a setup for "federal personal thugs". We've seen them now threatening not just American citizens, other politicians, judges. ICE has been given instructions to simply go operate on their own without direction to "find" people. The laws surroundings them are surprisingly forgiving / people have few protections. This step seems to just be to dump vast quantities of data they could just for anything they wish from departments that had rules for how they can use that data ... to a group that has few rules ...
- sneak 1y agoThey regularly imprison people for days, weeks, or months without trial that they know are US citizens.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoWhat are the stats, how regularly?
- jimt1234 1y agoIllegally detaining a single US citizen is one too many.
- ryandrake 1y agoIllegally detaining anyone is one too many.
- esseph 1y agoHard to say without due process. Takes time to go through courts if it even does. https://www.openice.org/ https://www.openice.org/
- thatguy0900 1y agoI mean that's kind of the problem of avoiding the court system as much as they can. There is no stats, who knows
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoThe federal government loves to play this 'it's only civil, not criminal, therefor a loser set of rules apply' to lots of things. Knowing it's an end run around rights people/lawyers/courts have still let them get away with it because they support the final outcome or because it simplifies the process.
- MiguelX413 1y ago> loser Looser?
- jrs235 1y agoAnd the problem of not allowing other government officials outside of ICE and the executive having access to facilities, paperwork, camera systems. ICE can too easily hide what they are doing. The lack of transparency and oversight is despicable.
- saguntum 1y agoHere is an article about the topic: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/tracking-us-citizens-children-detained-deported-ice-trump-updates.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/tracking-us-citizens... There's a 2011 study linked there but as others mentioned, hard to track without due process.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoThanks. At the end it links to a study that estimates citizens at 1-1.5% of removals. https://jacquelinestevens.org/StevensVSP18.32011.pdf https://jacquelinestevens.org/StevensVSP18.32011.pdf
- viraptor 1y agoTo a group with few rules, lots of funding coming their way and building concentration camps. In a year I expect to hear they're just a paramilitary group removing undesirable people regardless of immigration status.
- jimt1234 1y agoThe FBI was also controversial in its early days. But at least their agents wore nice suits and were held to a standard of conduct. ICE agents wear masks over their faces and urinate in public.
- insane_dreamer 1y agothe FBI doesn't have unfettered access to IRS data
- wnevets 1y agoIs this why Elon killed the free direct tax filing?
- kevingadd 1y agoIIRC the free tax filing thing being killed is just classic lobbying, the owners of Intuit and other paid tax filing companies have myriad political connections and spend a lot of money to protect their interests.
- 0xEF 1y agoCorrect. It's the same conversation every year, well before Elon came along. The big players are TurboTax and H&R Block. TurboTax specifically has led the charge for over two decades to prevent you from ever filing your taxes for free. It's a racket, and an extremely profitable one for them, so there's no way they're going to willingly give that up without some new and enforceable laws being passed.
- jalk 1y agoWasn't it auto-filling that got killed recently? IIRC TurboTax has to provide free filing service along with their paid services, but they employ a ton of dark patterns to steer people into the paying parts
- 0xEF 1y agoI think so? I'd have to look it up, but I believe you're right. They _definitely_ employ a lot of dark patterns, though. Glad you brought that up, because not enough people are taking the "dark patterns" thing seriously enough, in my opinion. It is absolutely wild what you can get people to do without even realizing it with some good front-end development, and none of us are immune to those tricks.
- wnevets 1y agoNo, it was DOGE and Musk that killed it [1], Elon even bragged about "deleting" [2] the team that created it. If you want to argue that lobbying got DOGE/Musk to do it that's fine but they're responsible for its death. [1] https://www.livenowfox.com/news/irs-direct-file-doge-cuts https://www.livenowfox.com/news/irs-direct-file-doge-cuts [2] https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/05/business/musk-irs-direct-file https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/05/business/musk-irs-direct-file
- ipv6ipv4 1y agoThat’s one way to push generally law abiding, tax paying people into the black market where they won’t pay taxes, and have a higher likelihood of dabbling in criminal enterprise.
- behringer 1y agoPerfect way to fill up the for-profit prisons and get that unpaid workforce that will replace all the migrants.
- criddell 1y agoDo the feds still use for-profit prisons?
- TimorousBestie 1y agoNo, but the feds still rent prisoners out for forced labor. The profits merely go to someone else.
- alistairSH 1y agoStopped via EO (Biden) in November 2022. Trump can easily start using them again, should he care to do so.
- esseph 1y agoMost if not all of those were revoked by Trump EOs.
- thanhhaimai 1y agoIn case you're serious about the question, the answer is a yes. Emphasis mine. > Seventy-five percent of the prisoners in U.S. Marshals custody are detained in state, local and _private_ facilities; the remainder are housed in Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facilities. https://www.usmarshals.gov/what-we-do/prisoners/operation/custody-detention https://www.usmarshals.gov/what-we-do/prisoners/operation/cu... Here is another source: > The U.S. Marshals Service detains about 60,000 people a day who are awaiting federal trial or sentencing. While it doesn't operate jails, it does partner with public and private detention facilities. The service assesses detention conditions at these facilities. > We found shortcomings in its oversight. For example, many deputies who reviewed state and local facilities hadn't received required training. Additionally, some facilities didn't meet some standards for 3 years in a row, including food safety standards. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106348 https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106348
- xnx 1y agoWorth reminding that the ICE budget is expanding to $28 billion. This is bigger than the budget of the FBI and DEA combined. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/12/us/politics/ice-expansion-concerns.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/12/us/politics/ice-expansion...
- mindslight 1y ago"3 5 0 1 2 5 Go!" was not meant to be taken this literally.
- _trampeltier 1y agoWhere do they find so many people to work for ICE in this short time?
- davidw 1y agoBy lowering their standards a lot.
- viraptor 1y agoYou're effectively asking where do they find people keen to be enforcement goons against mostly-foreigners, with minimal oversight and no need for identification. There's a large number of guys ready to join this one - they're in local fascist groups in all the cities.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
- epoxia 1y agoI would recommend reading Extreme Privacy by Michael Bazzell if these types of thing concern you. A relevant passage: "First, I would never provide my home address on any application or W-9 form. This should only be your PO Box, UPS Box, or PMB address. Your employer likely does not care much about where you live, unless the job has residency requirements, such as a police officer. The IRS does not object to the use of a mail box address. They just want their money."
- kevingadd 1y agoDoes this work in practice? Historically my actual residence is needed for tax reasons, i.e. properly tracking what state I owe income tax in for cash compensation and stock options.
- jlongr 1y agoNo. What he's describing is like covering your face with your hands and thinking that you're invisible.
- Thrymr 1y agoIt might help obscure your physical address in public records and keep private companies from finding it as easily, but yeah, it's not going to keep the government-wide database from locating you.
- Amfy 1y agoget a PMB in your state (or county even). You'll be surprised how many PMBs exist
- noman-land 1y agoWhat is a PMB?
- khuey 1y agoPrivate Mail Box (i.e. a PO Box like product at your local UPS store/etc).
- bdcravens 1y agoIf they are serious, they'd be using taxpayer data not to find people to deport, but to audit those with labor expenses that don't map to American taxpayers. Many American business owners are getting rich on the back of "illegal" labor, and the US's enforcement efforts seem to be willingly ignoring the demand side of the equation.
- IncreasePosts 1y agoI've wondered about it too, but I think it might just come down to it's far easier to say "papers, please" and verify them, versus auditing a business to understand where their payroll is going. You also need to account for people using stolen/borrowed credentials to appear to be able to work legally in the US(and generally verified by the federal government). If someone says they are Bob Jones, and they show you an ID, and you send that to the government and the government says Bob Jones can work for you, then you have no real way to tell that Bob Jones actually holds 40 different jobs simultaneously all over the country - but the government does.
- TimorousBestie 1y agoUnfortunately going after the business owners that profit from cheap labor is the one place neither party can tread. Recently Trump said he wants exceptions made for farms, hotels, golf courses, and the like.
- mindslight 1y agoThis is exactly the crux of it - why immigration reform has repeatedly failed for the past several decades, why people are so increasingly upset about it, and why Trump is going to do absolutely nothing to change the status quo beyond upping the fascism.
- tfandango 1y agoElimination of the incentives is the correct solution, yet solving the problem correctly is often harder and more time consuming than just saying you solved it. These raids are public and chaotic and easy, and then you can just claim to have solved the problem, which works just fine for them. You see, politically, the incentives are not to solve the problem because we believe the lies they tell.
- mass_and_energy 1y agoIf you're an American, you're living in the "before times". You need to take action to preserve your freedom, or you'll find yourself in an Orwellian hell hole wondering why you didn't do something when it was much easier to take political action.
- deepspace 1y agoAs an outsider is is difficult to watch Americans do nothing while their vaunted freedoms are stripped away one at a time.
- red-iron-pine 1y agoAI is very effective, and even before that the "Russian Firehose of Falsehood" approach worked. Firehose the populous with stupid BS and 3 minutes of hate activities and they'll eventually lose track of specific actions; essentially boiling a frog
- humbleferret 1y agoA system that matches by name rather than a unique ID is wild. It could easily identify the wrong people.
- daft_pink 1y agoIt’s obviously an extremely efficient way to identify those in the country illegally as it will provide their address, work location, information that can be easily, whether they’ve stolen someone’s identity and quickly linked to another database that can verify work authorization. Third parties like employers/banks/payors have to provide the information that they have into the system. Whether you like it or not, it totally makes sense that ICE would want information from the IRS.
- iJohnDoe 1y agoAny existing theories where all this is going? What’s the long term play here? When Bush Jr. was president, he grabbed so much power. Didn’t make sense he would just hand that power over to the next guy, but he indeed have a peaceful transfer of power. I’m not sure Democrats would want to give this much power to ICE. Not really thinking about Trump as a third term, but maybe we’re just doomed to have Republicans in power - forever being elected?
- red-iron-pine 1y agothey're not planning for elections...
- insane_dreamer 1y agoICE is the new gestapo as for the illegals, if they're in the IRS database that means they're paying taxes -- which means they're contributing positively to the economy; give them legal status so they can continue contributing -- all this does is push them to _not_ file the country would be much better off if engineers' time was spent building systems to catch the large amount of tax fraud by the wealthy -- IRS estimated a tax gap of $700 billion.
- jrs235 1y agoThe Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt... Rather than spending billions of dollars on ICE and filling up the queues, the money should have been spent on the bottleneck, the courts. Invest in more courts and judges to address the bottleneck. It's obvious to me it's not about kicking and keeping some people out, it's about dehumanizing and detaining people for long periods of time, or indefinitely, and forcing them to provide free and cheap labor via the for-profit prison BS, here in the US or abroad.