Category: Washington Post

The Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute President Donald Trump’s critics entered a new phase this week, when federal prosecutors failed to indict six Democratic lawmakers who recorded a video reminding military service members of their duty to refuse illegal orders.

Department lawyers, under pressure from the president, previously targeted several of Trump’s most outspoken foes, including former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Both faced since-dismissed charges last year over alleged conduct unrelated to their political views.

But the case federal prosecutors put before a grand jury Tuesday — seeking to charge Sens. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.) and four others over their 90-second video message — marked the first time the department has directly sought to classify critical speech from prominent Trump detractors as a crime.

The other lawmakers who participated in the video included Reps. Jason Crow, a former Army ranger from Colorado, and Maggie Goodlander, a Navy veteran from New Hampshire, as well as Chrissy Houlahan, a former Air Force officer, and Chris Deluzio, a former Navy officer, both from Pennsylvania.

Grand jurors roundly rejected the effort, the Washington Post reported. But legal observers and the lawmakers at the center of the probe have argued in the days since that the panel’s decision is almost beside the point.

“This is not a good news story,” Kelly, a retired Navy captain and astronaut, told reporters during a news conference this week. “This is a story about how Donald Trump and his cronies are trying to break our system to silence anyone who lawfully speaks out against them.”

The attempt to charge the lawmakers represents an evolution of the campaign that began last year with cases against James and Comey, said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College.

“Prosecuting people for speech criticizing the president is in some ways even more dangerous,” Nyhan said, “especially given these are legislators acting in their public role and especially given that they were calling for the military and national security state to follow the law.”

Still, some Trump allies in Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), defended the administration’s efforts. He told reporters that Slotkin, Kelly, and the others “probably should be indicted.”

“Any time you’re obstructing law enforcement and getting in the way of these sensitive operations, it’s a very serious thing, and it probably is a crime,” he said.

The Justice Department’s criminal investigation into the lawmakers began after the video organized by Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, was posted online in November. In it, she and the others, all of whom served in the military or with intelligence agencies, reminded service members of their duty, spelled out in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to resist unlawful directives.

“This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens,” the lawmakers said. “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”

The video did not single out any specific Trump administration policies. But Slotkin and Kelly, both of whom serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee, have sharply criticized the president for military strikes he authorized on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean and his decision to deploy the National Guard to cities run by Democratic officials.

Their video drew an immediate reaction from Trump, who demanded on social media that the lawmakers face prosecution for sedition and suggested they should even, perhaps, be punished with execution.

“SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Trump wrote in one social media post soon after the video was posted. He said in another: “IT WAS SEDITION AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL, AND SEDITION IS A MAJOR CRIME.”

The messages echoed another Trump post from last year in which he, in a missive addressed to “Pam,” an apparent reference to Attorney General Pam Bondi, insisted the Justice Department move swiftly to prosecute Comey, James, and others.

“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he wrote then, adding, “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Within months, James was indicted on counts of mortgage fraud, while Comey was charged with lying to Congress. Both denied the accusations and their cases were later dismissed by a federal judge over technical issues with the appointment of the prosecutor who had charged them.

Slotkin, Kelly, and the other lawmakers have maintained they did nothing wrong — even as top administration officials have accused them of using the video to encourage service members to take actions tantamount to mutiny.

Earlier this month, four of the lawmakers in the video disclosed that they had been approached by FBI agents and declined to give voluntary interviews to prosecutors.

“It was clearly, when our lawyers sat down with them, just about checking a box and doing what the president wanted them to do,” Slotkin said Wednesday. “Their heart wasn’t even in it.”

It is not clear whether the FBI took other steps to investigate. But on Tuesday, prosecutors under the supervision of D.C.’s U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox News host and staunch Trump ally, presented a case against the lawmakers to the grand jury.

Two political appointees led that presentation, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sealed court proceedings.

The prosecutors — Steven Vandervelden, a former colleague of Pirro’s in the district attorney’s office in Westchester, New York, and Carlton Davis, a former staffer for House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.) — sought to charge the lawmakers with a felony crime that makes it illegal to “interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the military or naval forces of the United States,” the people said.

But when it came time to vote, none of the grand jurors agreed there was sufficient probable cause to charge any of the lawmakers with a crime, one of the people familiar said.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department and for Pirro have declined to comment on the matter in the days since. Amid that silence, the effort has drawn an impassioned response from Capitol Hill.

“The fact that they failed to incarcerate a United States senator should not obviate our outrage,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii) said during a heated session Wednesday in which Democratic senators implored their Republican colleagues to openly condemn the Justice Department’s actions. Senate Democrats held a special caucus meeting Thursday morning to further discuss the situation.

“They tried to incarcerate two of us,” Schatz said. “I am not entirely sure the United States Senate can survive this if we do not have Republicans standing up.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (North Carolina) has emerged as one of the few Republicans to publicly rebuke the department. He described the failed attempt to prosecute as exactly the type of weaponization of the justice system that the Trump administration has said it is fighting against.

“Political lawfare is not normal, not acceptable, and needs to stop,” Tillis wrote in a post to X.

At their news conference Wednesday, Kelly told reporters that he and Slotkin learned about the attempt to indict them Tuesday through media reports.

“If things had gone a different way, we’d be preparing for arrest,” Slotkin said.

Since then, lawyers for several of the targeted lawmakers have sent letters to Pirro and Bondi seeking assurances that the investigation is over and that prosecutors will not seek to indict them again. They’ve also instructed the department to retain all records of the investigation threatening potential legal action for violating the lawmakers’ free-speech rights.

In a separate suit filed by Kelly, a federal judge Thursday halted Defense Department efforts to formally censure the senator over his video remarks, saying the effort to do so “trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees.”

“The intimidation was the point — to get other people beyond us to think twice about speaking out,” Slotkin said Wednesday. “But the real question is if the president can do this to us — sitting senators — who else can he do it to?”

The Trump administration spent more than $40 million last year to send hundreds of migrants to at least two-dozen countries that are not their own, a tactic Senate Democrats described in a report Friday as a costly strategy aimed at sowing fear and intimidation in the president’s mass deportation campaign.

The 30-page analysis from the minority members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee accuses the administration of entering into opaque financial agreements with foreign governments — including some with poor records on corruption and human rights — to rapidly expand a program for “third country” removals that once had been reserved for exceptional circumstances.

Its authors contend that the State Department has failed to conduct sufficient oversight to ensure that payments to those countries are not being misspent and that migrants transferred to their custody are not being abused or mistreated.

The administration “has expanded and institutionalized a system in which the United States urges or coerces countries to accept migrants who are not their citizens, often through arrangements that are costly, inefficient and poorly monitored,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the committee, wrote in a letter to colleagues. “Deporting migrants to countries they have no connection to … has become a routine instrument of diplomacy.”

Administration officials have said they have no choice but to partner with foreign governments that are willing to accept undocumented immigrants whose native nations are not willing to take them back. In most cases, the migrants have criminal records, authorities said, though public records have shown that some have not been convicted of crimes in the United States.

The report from Senate Democrats, which provides the most comprehensive look at the administration’s third-country removal program, found that the U.S. government has sent migrants to two-dozen third countries. The analysis focused primarily on five nations — El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, Eswatini, and Palau — with which the Trump administration has entered into direct financial payments totaling $32 million, a committee member involved in the report said. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the analysis ahead of its release.

Under those agreements, U.S. authorities sent about 250 Venezuelan migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador last spring, while 29 migrants have been deported to Equatorial Guinea, 15 to Eswatini, and seven to Rwanda, the report said. None has been sent to Palau.

The report also estimated that the administration has spent more than $7 million in costs related to deportation flights to 10 of the third countries.

“Millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent without meaningful oversight or accountability,” Shaheen wrote in her letter. “And speed and deterrence are being prioritized over due process and respect for human rights.”

Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, said the report shows the “unprecedented” work the administration has undertaken in its first year to enforce immigration laws.

“Astonishingly, some in Congress still want to go back to a time just 14 months ago when cartels had free rein to poison Americans and our border was open,” Pigott said in a statement. “Make no mistake, President Trump has brought Biden’s era of mass illegal immigration to an end, and we are all safer for it.”

The third-country strategy has provoked public blowback and legal challenges that have slowed the administration’s efforts and, in some instances, forced it to change course.

Last spring, President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used law targeting enemy combatants, which provided the administration’s legal rationale to send the Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. Administration officials accused many of being members of the Tren de Aragua transnational gang, though some of their families and attorneys disputed that contention.

The men were later transferred from El Salvador to Venezuela under a prisoner swap. On Thursday, a federal judge in Washington ruled that the administration must bring some of the Venezuelan deportees back to the United States as they pursue legal challenges to their removals.

“It is worth emphasizing that this situation would never have arisen had the Government simply afforded Plaintiffs their constitutional rights before initially deporting them,” Chief U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg wrote in his ruling.

The analysis from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority was put together over a period of more than eight months, based on conversations with foreign government and U.S. government officials, attorneys for deportees and immigrant rights organizations, according to the committee staffer.

The staffer said the goal of the report is to highlight the costs of the administration’s approach at a time when Democrats are concerned that the U.S. government is “entering a new phase” of speeding up the number of third-country agreements, along with the pace of deportations.

The report faults the administration for pursuing its deportation policies at the expense of other U.S. interests, including promoting human rights and punishing corrupt foreign regimes.

The authors said the Trump administration’s payment of $7.5 million to Equatorial Guinea to accept immigrants was more than the amount of foreign assistance the United States provided to that country in the previous eight years. They cited a 2025 State Department report on human trafficking that cited U.S. concerns about “corruption and official complicity in trafficking crimes” in that country.

The report also said the Trump administration was moving hastily to carry out third-country removals without trying to negotiate with the home countries of some deportees. In one case, a man initially deported to Eswatini was later sent to his home nation of Jamaica, where government officials said they had never told the United States that they were unwilling to accept him.

“As a result, the Trump Administration has, in some cases, paid twice for migrants’ travel — once to remove them to a third country and then again to fly them to their home country,” the report says.

President Donald Trump has backed down from his decision to exclude Democratic governors from an annual White House meeting that has long been bipartisan, according to the National Governors Association.

For decades, the White House meeting between the president and governors — held around the NGA’s annual winter gathering in Washington — has included Republican and Democratic governors. That nearly changed last week when Trump did not extend an invitation to Democrats, sparking concern among governors. After telling Democratic governors Friday that they would not be invited to the meeting, the bipartisan NGA said the meeting would no longer be part of the organization’s official schedule for the gathering.

On Wednesday, however, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R), the NGA chairman, told governors that Trump would be inviting all governors to the White House on Feb. 20 for the NGA’s business breakfast.

“He was very clear in his communications with me that this is a National Governors Association’s event, and he looks forward to hosting you and hearing from governors across the country,” Stitt wrote to the governors. “President Trump said this was always his intention, and we have addressed the misunderstanding in scheduling.”

Governors from all states are expected to gather in Washington for their conference from Feb. 19 to 21.

And while all governors are now being invited to the White House, not all Democrats were invited to a separate dinner there scheduled to be held around the NGA gathering. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, both Democrats, said in recent days that their invitations to the dinner had been rescinded. The other 16 Democratic governors remained on the guest list but decided Tuesday that they would not attend unless all 18 of them were invited.

Trump said on social media Wednesday that the situation over the White House meeting invitations had been a misunderstanding — and he blamed it on Stitt, whom he referred to as a “Republican In Name Only.” Stitt “incorrectly stated my position on the very exclusive Governors Annual Dinner and Meeting at the White House,” Trump wrote, and said that invitations were sent “to ALL Governors, other than two, who I feel are not worthy of being there.”

Trump emphasized that Polis and Moore had not been invited to the dinner, slinging baseless accusations against them, but he noted that he did invite some Democratic governors that he has repeatedly sparred with, including Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“Stitt got it WRONG!” Trump wrote. “I look forward to seeing the Republican Governors, and some of the Democrats Governors who were worthy of being invited.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had defended Trump’s decision to exclude the Democrats from the meeting only a day earlier. “The president has the discretion to invite whomever he wants to the White House,” she told reporters.

NGA CEO Brandon Tatum said in a statement that the organization was “pleased the president will welcome governors from all 55 states and territories to the White House.”

“The bipartisan White House governors meeting is a valued tradition and an important opportunity to build bridges and hold constructive conversations,” Tatum said. “The NGA looks forward to continued collaboration between governors and the White House.”

The Democratic Governors Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the meeting and dinner.

One evening last summer, Donna Hughes-Brown was handcuffed and led into a filthy holding cell somewhere in Kentucky, where insects crawled out of a drain and feces streaked the walls.

The Missouri grandmother’s life had taken an unrecognizable turn days earlier, when federal agents pulled her off an arriving flight at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, arrested her and told her she would be deported.

Her crime? Writing two bad checks, for a combined total of less than $75, more than a decade earlier.

Hughes-Brown, a lawful permanent resident of the United States since she was a child, would go on to spend 143 days — nearly five months — in detention. She was only released at the end of last year after an immigration judge granted an application to stop her removal. Her story underscores just how far the Trump administration is willing to go in its quest to boost deportations, extending its dragnet to people who are legally present in the country with minor offenses from years earlier.

For those swept up in the expanding deportation drive, it is also increasingly difficult to win release, resulting in lengthy detentions such as the one Hughes-Brown experienced. In November, the number of people released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention into the U.S. fell about 70 percent from a year earlier, according to a recent report from the American Immigration Council.

When asked about Hughes-Brown, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, defended her agency’s handling of the case. A conviction for passing bad checks does “not make for an upstanding lawful permanent resident,” McLaughlin said in an email. A spokesperson for ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

Hughes-Brown, 59, is an Irish citizen and green-card holder who immigrated to the U.S. with her parents in 1978. Before last year, she never imagined she would become a target of the administration’s clampdown on immigration, she said, and she believed that everyone should come to the country legally, like she did.

Now back home in small-town Missouri, Hughes-Brown said she thinks constantly of the women she left behind in detention: Jeimy, a 25-year-old from Guatemala who is married to an American citizen; Grace, a woman from Venezuela with a congenital heart condition; Beata, a Polish green-card holder with two convictions for minor retail theft more than a decade ago, her story an echo of Hughes-Brown’s.

“It was the intent for this to happen to so many people,” Hughes-Brown said. “It doesn’t really matter how you got here, the end result is the same.”

A $25 mistake

Hughes-Brown’s ordeal began last July, when she made her first overseas trip in almost a decade. Her aunt had died, so Donna and her husband, Jim Brown, traveled to Ireland, gathering with family at a lighthouse overlooking an estuary as they spread her aunt’s ashes.

At the airport in Dublin, Donna and Jim precleared U.S. Customs and Immigration. Officers pulled Donna aside and asked questions about her travel history. Then they let her proceed to her flight, she said.

As the plane was approaching Chicago’s O’Hare airport, the flight attendant announced that all passengers would be required to show their passports as they exited. That’s odd, Donna thought. Exiting the plane, she saw armed officers waiting on the jet bridge. They were there for her.

After a night in a cell at O’Hare, Donna received paperwork explaining why she had been apprehended. She was flummoxed. Back in 2015, she pleaded guilty to passing a bad check the previous year, a misdemeanor. The check was for $25, court records show, and made out to Krazy Korner, a gas station, and convenience store.

She was living paycheck to paycheck and didn’t realize the check would bounce, Donna says. After it did, court records show, she paid restitution of $80 plus court fees of $117 and served a year of probation. She stabilized her finances, building a career as a home health care aide. She was certain that chapter was closed.

The government also cited a separate 2012 misdemeanor conviction for passing a bad check. Records from that case are not available to the public because the case was either dismissed or expunged, a county official in Missouri said. Donna barely remembered it; she believes it was for less than $50 at a grocery store.

While lawful permanent residents have considerably more protection from deportation than visa holders, the government can seek to deport green-card holders for certain nonviolent offenses. One such situation: crimes of “moral turpitude,” which include offenses with an intent to steal or defraud.

But the government has an “immense amount of discretion” in deciding whether to exercise such powers and whether to detain someone, said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor and immigration expert at Ohio State University. In the past, he said, he would have expected DHS to exercise its discretion favorably in Donna’s case, given her “half a century in the United States with only one or two extremely minor hiccups.”

To assert that passing a bad check more than a decade ago “makes you unworthy of living in the U.S. — that’s a policy decision,” García Hernández said. What’s more, detaining someone for months is “neither easy nor cheap.”

The average cost to house an ICE detainee per day was $187, according to the most recent figures available. At that rate, detaining Hughes-Brown cost taxpayers about $27,000.

‘Hell from both sides’

In early August, Donna and several other detainees were handcuffed and loaded into a van for the six-hour drive from Illinois to Campbell County Detention Center, a local jail in Kentucky that also houses ICE detainees. Four hundred miles from home, she lived in a pod with dozens of other women, she says, sleeping on metal bunks with only a thin mat and toilets that were clogged for days.

One of the women was Beata Siemionkowicz, a lawful permanent resident from outside of Chicago who has lived in the U.S. since 1995. Federal agents arrested her at her daughter’s house in August, her lawyer, George Gomez, said, and told her they were launching deportation proceedings. The reason: two misdemeanor cases for retail theft in 2005 and 2011.

Meanwhile, Donna’s husband, Jim, was doing everything he could think of to get her released. They’d met online and married seven years before, building a life in Cyrene, a tiny town south of Bowling Green, where they keep three horses and are active in their church. After Hurricane Helene, they twice filled a 30-foot horse trailer with supplies and drove it to North Carolina to help disaster victims.

A combat veteran turned CT technologist, Jim describes himself as a conservative Christian and voted for Trump in 2024. He’s not against immigration: He grew up around migrant workers in Texas, hard-working people who paid taxes into the system.

When Donna was detained, Jim wrote to every member of Missouri’s congressional delegation. He struck out, but then help came from an unexpected place: Rep. Seth Magaziner, a Democrat who represents Rhode Island. Magaziner brought Jim to Washington to speak at a panel on Trump’s immigration crackdown. At the event, Jim was asked why he had voted for Trump. He paused. “Because I was an idiot,” he answered.

The partisan backlash has been swift, he said. Longtime friends in the ruby-red county where the couple lives have turned their back on him because he criticized Trump. Meanwhile, more liberal neighbors have said his wife’s ordeal is a fitting consequence of his vote.

“My family and I have got hell from both sides,” Jim said.

In December, Magaziner also asked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem about Donna’s case during a hearing on Capitol Hill. “The Trump Administration claimed it would target the ‘worst of the worst,’ but no one understands how false that promise was more than Jim and Donna Brown,” Magaziner said in a statement.

As the months rolled by, Donna spent two stints in an isolation cell, where the only book allowed was the Bible and she was permitted an hour outside every other day. Her requests to be released on bond were rejected by an immigration judge. But on Dec. 18, after a hearing during which family members talked about how devastating her deportation would be, the judge granted her application to cancel removal proceedings. DHS declined to appeal the decision.

Still, Donna doesn’t intend to take chances. Her passport and green card were finally returned to her last week after the Irish consulate intervened. “I’m not even getting close to the border,” she said.

These days, she senses an awkwardness with some friends. They’re sorry for what happened to her but still support the administration’s efforts. That’s their right, she says, and she’s not interested in cutting people off because they disagree with her.

But she does want to talk to them. About how helpless she felt in her darkest moments in detention – labeled a criminal, locked away and unsure if she would ever return to her life in Missouri. She’s determined to fight for the women she met there.

“I’m going to keep on keepin’ on,” Donna said. “Because it is not right. It is not right.”

The Internal Revenue Service improperly shared confidential tax information of thousands of individuals with immigration enforcement officials, according to three people familiar with the situation, appearing to breach a legal firewall intended to protect taxpayer data.

The erroneous disclosure was only recently discovered, the people said. The IRS is working with officials from the Treasury Department, Justice Department, and Department of Homeland Security on the administration’s response.

The IRS confirmed the Washington Post’s reporting in a court filing Wednesday afternoon. Dottie Romo, the tax agency’s chief risk and control officer, wrote in a sworn declaration that the IRS provided confidential taxpayer information even when DHS officials could not provide sufficient data to positively identify a specific individual.

But in a controversial decision, Treasury, which oversees the IRS, in April agreed to provide DHS with the names and addresses of individuals the Trump administration believed to be in the country illegally, pursuant to DHS requests.

Federal courts have since blocked the data-sharing arrangement, holding that it violates taxpayers’ rights, though the government appealed those rulings.

Before the agreement was struck down, DHS requested the addresses of 1.2 million individuals from the IRS. The tax agency responded with data on 47,000 individuals, according to court records.

When the IRS shared the addresses with DHS, it also inadvertently disclosed private information for thousands of taxpayers erroneously, a mistake only recently discovered, said the people familiar, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Romo, in her declaration, did not state when the IRS learned of its error. She said the agency notified DHS on Jan. 23, to begin taking steps to “prevent the disclosure or dissemination, and to ensure appropriate disposal, of any data provided to ICE by IRS based on incomplete or insufficient address information.”

She declined to state if the IRS would inform people whose data was illegally disclosed to immigration officials, and said DHS and ICE had agreed to “not inspect, view, use, copy, distribute, rely on, or otherwise act on any return information that has been obtained from or disclosed by IRS” because of the pending litigation.

The affected individuals could be entitled to financial compensation for each time their information was improperly shared. And government officials can personally face stiff civil and criminal penalties for sharing confidential tax information.

Charles Littlejohn, an IRS contractor, pleaded guilty in 2023 to leaking the tax returns of President Donald Trump and other wealthy individuals.

Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison. Trump in January sued the IRS for $10 billion in damages related to the Littlejohn leak.

In a statement, a DHS spokesperson said that under the data-sharing agreement, “the government is finally doing what it should have all along.”

“Information sharing across agencies is essential to identify who is in our country, including violent criminals, determine what public safety and terror threats may exist so we can neutralize them, scrub these individuals from voter rolls, and identify what public benefits these aliens are using at taxpayer expense,” the spokesperson said.

There is little evidence that undocumented immigrants have attempted to participate in U.S. elections, nor is there a link between undocumented immigrants and higher levels of crime.

“With the IRS information specifically, DHS plans to focus on enforcing long-neglected criminal laws that apply to illegal aliens,” the DHS spokesperson said.

Treasury and Justice Department spokespeople declined to comment, citing agency policies not to comment on active litigation. The Office of the Deputy Attorney General is monitoring the ongoing litigation, but the office is not making any decisions on the matter, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly.

When the IRS began conversations with DHS over data sharing shortly after Trump returned to the White House, senior IRS employees warned administration officials that the program was likely illegal and could sweep up misidentified people, the Post has reported.

During early meetings on the project, one agency staffer asked immigration authorities how many people with the same name may live in the same state, according to one of the people, illustrating how easy it would be for the Trump administration to inadvertently breach taxpayers’ privacy, including those who are not targets of immigration investigations.

The IRS’s privacy department was largely sidelined from the talks, two of the people said, and its IT department took over implementing the data sharing. That team had largely been taken over by officials from Trump’s U.S. DOGE Service, the White House’s “efficiency” office charged with shrinking the federal government.

Treasury officials justified the data-sharing agreement by arguing immigration enforcement was pursuing individuals who had violated criminal statutes, though immigration violations are generally civil, not criminal.

Under the arrangement, DHS would provide the IRS with the name and address of a taxpayer. The IRS would then cross-reference that information with its confidential databases and confirm the taxpayers’ last known address.

Immigration officials said the procedure was necessary because DHS lacked reliable information to locate individuals the Trump administration wanted to detain and deport, according to numerous IRS and DHS officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.

“This allegedly unauthorized viewing involves personal information that taxpayers provided to the IRS pursuant to a promise that the IRS would prioritize keeping the information confidential,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in a November order. “A reasonable taxpayer would likely find it highly offensive to discover that the IRS now intends to share that information permissively because it has replaced its promise of confidentiality with a policy of disclosure.”