A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to continue a policy that permits the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to share certain taxpayer address information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for criminal investigations.
Immigration advocacy groups had sought a preliminary injunction to block the policy, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed a lower court’s decision denying that request.
The dispute began in early 2025 after reports that ICE was seeking the last known addresses of roughly 700,000 undocumented immigrants from the IRS. On April 7, 2025, the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) formalized the arrangement in a Memorandum of Understanding outlining how ICE could request address information under federal law.
The agreement relies on a provision of federal tax law that allows the IRS to share certain information for non-tax criminal investigations.
Historically, the IRS had interpreted the law as prohibiting the disclosure of mailing addresses by themselves. The new agreement reversed that position, allowing the IRS to provide a taxpayer’s last known address if ICE submitted a valid request related to a non-tax criminal investigation.
As a result, the April 7, 2025, Memorandum of Understanding allowing ICE to request last-known taxpayer addresses remains in effect while the case proceeds. A preliminary injunction would have temporarily blocked the policy, but the court declined to grant one.
The advocacy groups argued that the law does not allow the IRS to share only a taxpayer’s address. They contended that mailing addresses should be treated as protected “taxpayer return information,” which typically requires a court order for disclosure.
The appeals court disagreed, saying the “best reading” of the statute permits the disclosure of address information in certain criminal investigations. The law allows the IRS to share “return information,” but specifically excludes a taxpayer’s “identity” from the more heavily protected category of “taxpayer return information.”
Because the statute defines “identity” to include a mailing address, the court concluded that addresses are not entitled to the heightened protections the advocacy groups claimed.
The court also noted that other parts of the law explicitly require a court order before information can be disclosed, but this provision does not. It said it would not “read into the statute words that aren’t there,” concluding that the law clearly allows the IRS to disclose address information in response to a valid administrative request.
The advocacy groups also argued that the IRS violated the Administrative Procedure Act by reversing its long-standing interpretation of the law without providing a reasoned explanation.
The court rejected that claim for two reasons. First, it said the memorandum was not a binding “final agency action,” but rather a policy statement clarifying how the agency would apply the statute. Second, citing the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the court noted that judges no longer defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. Because the court determined that the “best reading” of the statute permits address disclosure, it said sending the matter back to the IRS for further explanation would be a “useless formality.”
Because the advocacy groups failed to show they were likely to succeed in their legal challenge, the D.C. Circuit upheld the lower court’s decision denying the preliminary injunction.
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