NEW BEDFORD — Every February since he began work, James has been coming to the Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts to file his tax returns.
An immigrant from Colombia who works as a teacher, James said he came to the U.S. in 2001 when he was 6 years old. He’s been enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program since the Obama administration created it in 2012, though his parents remain undocumented.
Yet, this year, his obligation to file taxes has taken on a new dimension of fear for James, who asked to use a pseudonym due to concerns around immigration enforcement.
“It’s just the context of the moment, politically,” he told The Light during an interview just after filing. “We see a lot of what’s happening in the news and it’s scary.
“Now, they’re going out seemingly to hunt immigrants,” he continued. “We’re very conscious of what’s happening.”
As tax season ramps up, immigrants in New Bedford — and across the nation — are struggling with how to proceed. Is it safe to file their returns, or is this yet another trap that the Trump administration has laid out?
In April 2025, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent signed an agreement enabling the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to share information for criminal investigations that are not necessarily tax-related. The move, which ignored decades of practice and statute, prompted a lawsuit by several advocacy groups, led by the New Bedford-based CEDC, in September.
“There’s fear around filing,” said Brian Pastori, deputy director of the CEDC. The nonprofit handled fewer tax filings a year ago than in previous tax filing seasons.
“We’re obligated to tell people that this information is going to be shared with ICE,” he continued. “So sometimes this leads people to decide not to file.”
The result: a Catch-22 where immigrants can be deported for lawfully filing their taxes — or fined or imprisoned for failing to file out of fear of deportation.
The suit led to a preliminary injunction preventing ICE from using data previously provided by the IRS. Judge Indira Talwani issued the injunction on Feb. 5 in U.S. District Court Massachusetts.
“This decision protects the fundamental promise that personal taxpayer information will be kept private,” said Corinn Williams, the CEDC director, in a news release after Talwani issued the injunction. “Today’s ruling sends a powerful message that the law is meant to protect families, not put them in harm’s way.”
Nonetheless, many fear the damage has already been done.
Lawsuit
Pastori said the April 2025 agreement between the IRS and ICE — signed 10 days before the annual tax filing deadline — frightened many people away from filing tax returns. He told The Light that some people who had filed taxes at the CEDC for years simply walked away after being informed of the ICE-IRS information sharing.
He said that in 2024, the CEDC helped 140 people obtain new Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers, issued by the government for people ineligible for Social Security numbers. In 2025, that dropped to 32.
“It creates a ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’ scenario and penalizes people who voluntarily complied with the laws as they stood,” he said. “ICE and the IRS are trying to maneuver to skirt the intent of the law.”
Authorities considered tax return filers’ information public record until 1976, when the Tax Reform Act passed in reaction to President Richard Nixon’s use of tax records to punish political opponents. Section 6102 of the act made it a criminal offense for the IRS to share such records with any other branch of government, attaching financial and carceral penalties to individual government agents.
Nonetheless, the act enables information sharing for non-tax enforcement purposes under a judicial order or if a request meets certain narrow parameters. It was these exemptions that the Trump administration attempted to use to share tax information between federal agencies.
“It creates a ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’ scenario and penalizes people who voluntarily complied with the laws as they stood. ICE and the IRS are trying to maneuver to skirt the intent of the law.”
— Brian Pastori
On June 27, ICE requested the last known address for some 1.28 million people, according to the CEDC lawsuit. Although the IRS found that the request did not provide enough specific information for the vast majority of those listed, it did provide enough information for 47,289 of those listed — a historic first.
“That is something that has never happened before en masse,” said Angela Divaris, senior attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services and co-director of that organization’s Tax Clinic. “There’s a lot of private information on a tax return. It’s not just about your income.”
Many nonprofits help tax filers through the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program, which has assisted low-income and other marginalized people to file their taxes for free since 1969.
At Greater Boston Legal Services, last year’s drop in immigrants seeking help was severe.
“Once the news that information was being shared got in,” Divaris said, “that’s pretty much gone down to zero for us.”
And that is a tragedy in Divaris’ eyes.
“For a lot of undocumented immigrants, there’s no viable pathway to get that Social Security number, but they want to do things right,” she said. “They know that filing taxes signals to the community and signals to themselves: ‘I’m trying to do the best I can.’”
Immigrants and taxes
It is a commonly held fallacy that immigrants, especially the undocumented, do not contribute to taxes. But it is quite the opposite. Though some undocumented immigrants work “under the table” for cash, many, probably most, are on a payroll.
“To the extent that they’re working and they have withholding [taxes], they’re paying taxes,” said Alan Clayton-Matthews, a professor emeritus of economics and public policy at Northeastern University. “If they buy something, they’re paying taxes. If they’re on a payroll, they’re paying taxes.”
A 2024 study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that in 2022, the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants nationwide contributed almost $97 billion in federal, state, and local taxes. A third of that money went to funding programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance, programs to which they do not have access.
A white paper recently published by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that immigrants (documented and undocumented) created a $14.5 trillion fiscal surplus between 1994 and 2023 — a contribution that saved the U.S. $3.9 trillion on public debt. For each of those years, “the U.S. immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government,” the report said.
If the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants pushes more of them to leave the country, many economists argue that will hurt Massachusetts and federal tax revenue. A recent estimate by the U.S. Census Bureau found that net international migration to the U.S. fell from 2.7 million a year as of July 2024 to 1.3 million as of July 2025.
“The economic story in Massachusetts is very much an immigrant story,” said Mark Melnik, director of the economic and public policy research group at UMass Amherst, during a recent meeting of advocates in Boston. “How does our economy grow? Our population grows with international migration.”
Melnick said that 80% of Massachusetts workforce growth has been due to international migration, providing money to circulate in local economies including New Bedford, one of several major hubs for immigrants in the state.
Though there is no data yet on the net drop or growth in international migration to Massachusetts, Clayton-Matthews said that the state does stand to get hit.
“Say an immigrant family who was working leaves, goes back to Guatemala,” he said. “The state is going to immediately lose the withholding and sales tax revenues and the federal government those for Social Security and Medicare.”
But immigrants who keep working in the U.S. and just stop filing tax returns may end up overpaying. That means communities could see millions of dollars disappear from their economies.
“I doubt that tax revenues will lower significantly by immigrants not filing,” Clayton-Matthews said. “People may be reluctant to file, but for most people in that situation, that usually means foregoing a refund.”
Trust may take years to rebuild
In her preliminary injunction, Judge Talwani said the information-sharing by the IRS was inconsistent with the federal Administrative Procedure Act, because the agency hadn’t carried out “a reasoned decisionmaking process” before the change.
“The IRS’ lack of explanation for such a substantial change in policy falls outside any ‘zone of reasonableness’ and reflects arbitrary and capricious agency action,” she wrote.
Nonetheless, some damage has been done. On Feb. 11, Dottie A. Romo, the chief risk and control officer for the IRS, informed the court that the IRS had mistakenly handed over 5% of the names requested by ICE in June — despite not having enough information provided as required per the agreement. Romo said had agreed not to use the information during a court injunction.
Even with a victory, advocates fear the trust between the communities they work with and the IRS is gone and will take years to rebuild.
“The IRS is now providing tax information for immigration enforcement,” Pastori said. “The house has already burned down.”
Contact Kevin G. Andrade at kandrade@newbedfordlight.org
