The Trump administration, in forcing the IRS to share its secret-by-law tax information with immigration enforcement authorities, is breaking with decades of precedent and almost certainly violating federal law.

The IRS leadership, including Acting Commissioner Melanie Krause, is headed for the exits for such a lawless breach.

There are a lot of things that differentiate the U.S. government from many more openly authoritarian ones around the world and one of them is that your info is protected.

So the vast troves of data that the government collects for all manner of purposes and on everyone is siloed away only for the purposes it was intended for and can’t just be picked over for any other agency at will for whatever purpose they want.

Data has always been power, and that’s especially so when the information can be gathered at scale from many sources, compiled and parsed with powerful tools that governments could once only have dreamed of, which can be used to monitor the population and punish dissent and opposition. So while the IRS violates the tax secrecy law, it also violates a core principle of U.S. democracy, in letting other parts of government root through the sensitive information of millions of people.

Aside from these more high-minded issues, there are some acute and immediate practical impacts here, namely that undocumented immigrant-led households paid some $90 billion in local, state and federal taxes in 2023, including billions in Social Security and Medicare taxes that they are not themselves eligible to ever get back, making them an outsize revenue source for these crucial programs.

These immigrants did so out of a variety of motivators, including establishing a record to potentially regularize their status later, in order to contribute to the common good and out of the sense that it would avoid making them targets for immigration enforcement. The rest of us got a windfall from their withholdings.

But such widespread cooperation with the taxman was only because it was known by all that income and earnings info would not be used for immigration purposes. That was the assurances not only of accountants and immigration lawyers, but also government officials themselves, who promised that the IRS data was strictly walled off for tax purposes alone.

Even if the administration insists that the only people who will be targeted are violent criminals, this is what they’ve said about every single one of their enforcement efforts so far. Yet these have decidedly not exclusively or even mostly targeted hardened criminals, as demonstrated by the saga of the family swept up in border czar Tom Homan’s own hometown upstate, or that 90% of the men sent to a Salvadoran prison don’t even have criminal records.

Why would undocumented immigrants pay their taxes now that we’ve opened the door to that responsible action being used to put them in detention and remove them from the country?

The MAGA crowd loves to wail about how immigrants don’t pay taxes, which is false, but they’re making it so with this short-sighted decision, just in time for Tax Day. Even if the policy never goes into effect, the damage has been done. It’s a broken promise and a trust that will be very hard to rebuild.

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