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1 1 (September 17, 2026)

handle is hein.crs/govevhh0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Updates on Litigation over the IRS-ICE Information-Sharing Agreement Updated September 17, 2026 In 2025, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (information- sharing agreement) to establish procedures between the two agencies to share information for the enforcement of criminal immigration laws. The initiative has been the subject of ongoing legal challenges, both to the information-sharing agreement itself and to the procedure developed by the IRS to process requests for information from ICE (data-exchange procedure). The primary legal questions in the litigation turn on whether the information-sharing agreement and data-exchange procedure comply with the requirements in Internal Revenue Code (I.R.C.) § 6103(i)(2), which authorizes disclosures of confidential tax return information to certain federal officers and employees for use in nontax criminal enforcement. With respect to the challenge to the information-sharing agreement itself, on February 24, 2026, the U.S. Court ofAppeals for the D.C. Circuit (D.C. Circuit) affirmed the denial ofa preliminary injunction that would have placed restrictions on information sharing pursuant to the agreement. A previous Legal Sidebar discussed the background of the information-sharing agreement, the legal questions at issue in the case (Centro de Trabajadores Unidos v. Bessent), and the parties' arguments before the appeals court. As for the challenges to the data-exchange procedure, to date two federal district courts have each granted injunctions against information sharing pursuant to the agreement. The government appealed each injunction. On September 8, 2026, the D.C. Circuit affirmed the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia's injunction. The appeal of the injunction by the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts is pending as of the date of this Legal Sidebar. This Legal Sidebar discusses the reasoning of the D.C. Circuit's decision in Centro and legal questions that remain. It discusses the two separate cases in the U.S. District Courts, the injunctions granted in them, and the status of the government's appeals of those injunctions. It focuses on the D.C. Circuit's and the district courts' decisions about the permissibility of the disclosures under the Internal Revenue Code (I.R.C.). Finally, it discusses congressional reactions to the court cases and subsequent developments related to the information-sharing agreement, including the IRS's admission that it had disclosed information based on incomplete and insufficient address information. Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov LSB11413 CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress