The IRS Is Building a System to Share Taxpayers' Data with ICE

Perceptions of ICE and Civil Liberties

• Many describe ICE as evolving into “personal thugs” or a proto-paramilitary force with minimal oversight, likened to a gestapo.
• Reports of citizens being detained for days or months without trial are highlighted; reliable statistics are said to be scarce due to avoidance of courts and lack of transparency.
• Concerns that immigration law being treated as “civil, not criminal” is used to bypass constitutional protections.

IRS Data Sharing, Privacy, and Behavioral Effects

• Sharing IRS data with ICE is seen as a major privacy breach that could push otherwise law‑abiding undocumented taxpayers into the black market, undermining tax compliance.
• Some argue this is an effective way to locate undocumented people (addresses, employers, identity theft detection), and “obviously” attractive to ICE.
• Critics warn of selective enforcement against political enemies once such a system exists.

Tax Filing Politics and Direct File

• Debate over whether lobbying by tax-prep companies vs actions by current leadership killed free/direct IRS filing.
• Consensus that the tax-prep industry has long lobbied to block simple, free filing and uses dark patterns to upsell.

Enforcement Priorities: Workers vs Employers

• Several argue that if authorities were serious, they’d use tax data to audit employers with suspicious labor expenses, not just deport workers.
• Both parties are seen as unwilling to seriously target businesses dependent on cheap undocumented labor, preferring visible raids that create the appearance of enforcement.

Prisons, Forced Labor, and Economic Incentives

• Thread connects expanded ICE powers to for‑profit detention, prison labor, and possible “concentration camp” style labor schemes, including rendition to foreign prisons.
• Some see the true goal as creating an internal security apparatus and cheap workforce, not solving immigration.

Privacy Evasion Tactics (PO Boxes, PMBs)

• Advice to use PO boxes or private mailboxes is discussed.
• Skeptics argue this offers only mild public‑facing obfuscation; government and data brokers can still easily link real addresses.

Authoritarian Drift, System Design, and Long-Term Fears

• Multiple commenters frame this as part of an authoritarian slide in the US “before times,” enabled by distraction and misinformation.
• Matching by name instead of unique IDs is criticized as error‑prone and likely to produce false positives.
• Some propose investing in courts and due process instead of expanding ICE, viewing current policy as intentionally dehumanizing and deterrence-by-terror (“self‑deportation”) rather than genuine problem‑solving.