🔴The Trump administration appears to be illegally leveraging tax authorities to obtain the home addresses of immigrants, according to the Washington Post. A federal judge has found that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) violated federal law “approximately 42,695 times” when it shared confidential taxpayer addresses with immigration enforcement officials last summer, as WaPo reports. By federal law, the IRS may only provide the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with tax records if the agency first identifies a person's address correctly. Instead, the DHS appears to have used the information sharing agreement to obtain addresses from the IRS, with address fields left blank or filled out incompletely. The incident marks yet another escalation in the use of financial infrastructure to achieve political ends. DHS officials have defended the data-sharing agreement as necessary to crack down on illegal immigration.