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A federal judge in Boston has denied moves by the federal government to dismiss a lawsuit that challenges information-sharing between the Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The New Bedford-based Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts has standing to sue ICE and the IRS, U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani ruled Sept. 30. The judge denied government lawyers’ motions to dismiss the lawsuit, which was filed by the CEDC and three other immigrant-advocacy groups.
The suit alleges the information sharing between ICE and IRS was illegal.
The lawsuit has already led to the revelation that the IRS had shared over 47,000 addresses with ICE in August 2025. ICE had asked the IRS to provide the addresses of noncitizen taxpayers with a final order of removal.
The suit has also forced the agencies to turn over hundreds of documents related to the shared information. It also challenges information-sharing between ICE and the Social Security Administration.
“At this stage, the court deems the connection between CEDC’s injuries and the agency action sufficiently plausible to afford CEDC organizational standing,” Talwani wrote in her decision.
“The court disagrees that the alleged unlawful disclosure of Plaintiffs’ members’ data is speculative where substantial disclosure by SSA and IRS has already occurred and additional disclosure is contemplated,” Talwani also wrote.
She granted the government’s motion to dismiss one charge: the plaintiffs’ claim that the IRS and ICE exceeded their authority.
The Social Security Administration handed over its email communications on a previous order from Talwani on May 9, 2026. More than 60 pages were redacted and Talwani ordered the government to submit the unredacted pages under seal to CEDC counsel on Sept. 15.
The lawsuit, filed in September 2025, argued that the IRS-ICE info-sharing agreement, signed in April 2025, broke the Tax Reform Act of 1976. That law largely prohibits the sharing of private information from tax returns by federal officials. Congress gave it teeth by including financial penalties and even imprisonment for IRS officials who shared such information without a judicial order.
Talwani imposed a preliminary injunction on Feb. 5 that blocked ICE’s use of the information provided by the IRS and SSA. The government is challenging the injunction before the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday.
The May hearing
In a hearing in Boston on May 8, Talwani listened to arguments about the government’s motion to dismiss and the plaintiffs’ motion to compel evidence of the turnover of taxpayers’ addresses.
Cesar Azrak, the assistant U.S. attorney who argued the case, said that circumstances had changed since the injunction because one of the complainants in the case did not claim that any of its members had been deported. Talwani displayed an inclination to disagree from the outset of the hearing.
“I understand the government didn’t agree with that,” she said. “But is there anything different that I need to address, assuming I still hold firm the views I had on standing when we were here last?”
Azrak subsequently left the Justice Department and was removed from the case on July 22.
Arguments at the May 8 hearing largely focused on an email chain where Joshua Rosenthal, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, associated with the Asian Law Caucus, requested administrative records from the Social Security Administration, the IRS, and the Department of Homeland Security.
The documents largely related to the erroneous sharing of approximately 2,300 addresses last August with ICE by the IRS and the actions taken since January to remediate the matter. It also asked for a letter penned by the Social Security Administration that permitted the sharing of up to 50,000 individuals’ information on a monthly basis, and ICE policies regarding the storage, disclosure, and use of received data.
Azrak responded to the request with an email on Feb. 3, asking for extra time and arguing that disclosure would be premature given the government’s motion for dismissal.
At the hearing, Azrak argued that there were questions around the feasibility of producing ICE documents. Talwani pushed back on that point.
“What I think I have in front of me is that ICE has this record,” she said. “They’re half of that agreement, so don’t we need their part on how they entered into that agreement?”
“It’s difficult to conceive of how ICE would go about assembling this record of how they conceived this document,” Azrak said in response.
Charlotte Kamai, an attorney for the plaintiffs, argued on the point that the government had already demonstrated misuse of the records it had obtained.
“Based on the supplemental declaration of records of the government,” she said, “we know that ICE has not only received [data] but actively used it.”
“The point of the administrative record is to present to the Court, and the other side, everything that happened,” argued Kamai.
In May, Talwani ordered the government to hand over the Social Security records by May 29. She said she needed time to consider the motion when it came to the ICE records. She has yet to come to a decision on those records.
Contact Kevin G. Andrade at kandrade@newbedfordlight.org.
