Trump isn’t trying to hunt immigrants down to get them to pay their taxes, because they already do. He’s trying to find them to abduct them
The Trump administration is seeking to turn the IRS into another immigrant-hunting apparatus of the federal government, by seeking the confidential information of taxpayers who are even just suspected of being undocumented.
“Under the agreement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement could submit names and addresses of suspected undocumented immigrants to the IRS to cross-reference with confidential taxpayer databases, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of professional reprisals,” The Washington Post reports. “Normally, personal tax information — even an individual’s name and address — is considered confidential and closely guarded within the IRS. Unlawfully disclosing tax data carries civil and criminal penalties.”
It’s a chilling escalation in Trump’s “bloody” mass detention and deportation agenda, which has widened into a sweeping net that is now ensnaring law-abiding community members with legal status. But Trump’s reported effort to seize confidential IRS data is also a tacit admission that, contrary to the right’s years of lies and tired myths about undocumented immigrants, these workers actually do pay taxes.
“Do you really believe they pay taxes?” Trump asked during his first presidential campaign in 2016. Yes, because they do.
Not only do undocumented workers pay nearly $100 billion in taxes annually and in most areas pay higher state and local tax rates than their wealthiest neighbors (more on this later), his own undocumented workers paid more in taxes than he did. The New York Times reported in 2017 that Trump, a purported billionaire who has spent years stiffing small businesses, paid just $750 in federal taxes in 2017. Yet he claims it’s immigrants who aren’t paying their fair share.
“Interesting,” the Young Center’s Belén Sisa responded in a TikTok on his plan seeking to seize personal IRS data. “So, to some people, you say that apparently we pay no taxes as undocumented immigrants, and now you’re using the IRS, or trying to use the IRS, to deport us. So what’s the story here?”
Here’s some of the real story on immigrants and taxes:
- According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), undocumented workers paid an astounding $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022 alone. “Most of that amount, $59.4 billion, was paid to the federal government while the remaining $37.3 billion was paid to state and local governments.”
- Six of the most immigrant-populous states accounted for a combined $21.1 billion of these contributions, with California leading the way at $8.5 billion in tax revenue. In nearly all states, “undocumented immigrants pay higher state and local tax rates than the top 1 percent of households living within their borders,” ITEP said.
- In 2022, undocumented workers paid $25.7 billion into Social Security, $6.4 billion into Medicare, and nearly $2 billion into unemployment – all programs that they’re barred from accessing unless they can adjust their legal status. In other words, undocumented workers have been helping subsidize critical federal programs for Americans, and getting nothing in return.
- In 2014, Stephen Goss, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, said that undocumented workers paid about $100 billion into Social Security over the previous decade, helping keep the fund solvent for retired and disabled Americans. “You could say legitimately that had we not received the contributions that we have had in the past from undocumented immigrants … that would of course diminish our ability to be paying benefits for as long as we now can,” he said in 2014.
- Immigrant households overall paid $524.7 billion in total taxes in 2021, “a slight increase since 2019,” Immigration Impact said in 2023. “This includes $346.3 billion in federal income taxes, and $178.4 billion in state and local taxes.” The research showed that while immigrants make up 13.6% of all U.S. households, their tax contributions make up nearly 16% of total tax revenues received by the federal government in 2021.
Despite the vast contributions of undocumented workers to the economy and federal programs essential to the lives of millions of Americans, these contributors could be ripped from their families and communities and thrown into horrific ICE detention conditions after just trying to follow the rules by filing their tax returns.
“If access to this confidential database is agreed upon, it would mark a significant shift, likely becoming the first time immigration officials have relied on the tax system for enforcement assistance in such a sweeping way,” The Guardian reports. As Truthout reports, the disclosure could “violate privacy laws passed by Congress after President Richard Nixon’s administration attempted to weaponize IRS records against political enemies decades ago.”
This unprecedented demand for personal IRS information would also have repercussions that go far beyond undocumented communities. For example, how exactly is the Trump administration going to figure out which taxpayers have legal immigration status and which ones don’t? Probably through racial profiling, which would then put non-white U.S. citizens and green card-holders in the crosshairs and at risk of separation from their families and costly fights to get out of ICE detention.
“‘… Do they sound like Jones and Smith, or do they sound like Rodriguez and Garcia?’ said Dorothy A. Brown, who studies tax policy and racial disparities at the Georgetown University Law Center,” The Washington Post reported last month. “This is racial profiling on steroids.”
Recall that the first high-profile workplace raid following Trump’s second inauguration ensnared a U.S. military veteran in New Jersey simply because of how he looked. “He is Puerto Rican and the manager of our warehouse,” his boss said at the time. “It looked to me like they were specifically going after certain kinds of people — not every kind, because they did not ask me for documentation for my American workers, Portuguese workers, or white workers.” Other Puerto Ricans have also been harassed in numerous other states. In Boston, a green card-holder didn’t even make it through the security line at the airport when he was “violently interrogated” for hours, stripped naked, and forced into a cold shower.
In his Boston Globe op-ed last year, tax expert Michael Ettlinger laid out in stark terms how family separation and the mass abduction of millions of workers will also reignite inflation, raise food costs, hurt the wages of U.S. born workers, and “vaporize” the economy.
“Removing 7.5 million undocumented workers would slash the national hours worked by 3.6 percent. Removing half of Mexican workers would increase the unemployment rate for unskilled US workers by more than 1 percent and bump up the unemployment rate for skilled US workers by more than 0.5 percent. Inflation would rise — by as much as 3 percentage points — and tax collections would go down by $100 billion a year.
Yes, economists know these things. So do most Americans. Fully 77 percent of those surveyed believe that unauthorized immigrants do jobs that citizens don’t want and aren’t going to take. Deporting them is bad for everyone.”
Some states that passed anti-immigrant legislation may be realizing that nativism is costly. In 2023, Florida passed anti-immigrant legislation as part of an effort to boost Governor Ron DeSantis’s disastrous presidential run. While the anti-immigrant bill didn’t drive DeSantis past Iowa, it did drive frightened immigrant workers out of Florida. Now, state lawmakers are looking at loosening child labor laws in order to fill the shortage they’ve only exacerbated. When it comes to the Trump administration’s IRS plan, consumer advocates have sued on behalf of a number of immigrant rights organizations.
Undocumented immigrants are here. They have American children, own homes, pay taxes, and contribute. It would be so much simpler for purposes of reform and stabilizing the economy if we just allowed them to apply for legalization. Instead, this immigrant-obsessed administration is seeking to turn the IRS into an apparatus of ICE to purge millions of workers and their contributions. And, can an administration that has committed the most disastrous security breach in recent memory truly be trusted with this sort of personal information?
