The Trump administration is turning the IRS into a border checkpoint

By Alma Cordero · Reporting from El Paso · October 2, 2026

By forcing tax filers to declare their citizenship status, the administration is weaponizing the tax code to terrorize immigrant families and strip children of basic support.

A tax form built for surveillance

Every April, my father sat at his kitchen table in El Paso with a stack of receipts. He used a sharpened pencil and a worn calculator to do what the government asked. He worked the chile and onion fields out past Fabens. When tax season came, he filed his papers honestly. That is what people do when they want to belong to a place. He did not know the state was cataloging those papers. He did not know they wanted to turn a civic duty into an instrument of deportation. Now, the Trump administration wants to turn the annual tax return into a border patrol checkpoint.

The Internal Revenue Service posted a draft 1040 form for 2026 in late August. Fox News and PBS reported on this draft. The draft includes a new question. It asks: "At the time you file your return, are you, and your spouse if filing jointly, a U.S. citizen, U.S. national, or an alien lawfully authorized to work in the U.S.?" Under the proposal, every tax filer must certify their status under penalty of law. The form has "Yes" and "No" checkboxes for both spouses. A draft of Schedule 3-A features a similar question. Taxpayers use this form to claim refundable tax credits.

The administration claims this requirement could save taxpayers up to $2 billion. They say it prevents undocumented migrants from collecting benefits. But Nina Olson, executive director for the Center for Taxpayer Rights, saw through the pretext immediately. "It’s dragging the IRS into this administration’s immigration policies," Olson said.

David Bier is the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. He named the real motive to reporters for Fox News and PBS. "It could be used as an immigration enforcement tool and that is probably the reason why they are doing this," Bier said. That is the mechanism of the Census Act lawsuit. The lawsuit followed the United States census, which was the 24th decennial census. Census Day was April 1. This census was the first to offer online or phone responses alongside paper forms.

The cost paid by working families

The Treasury Department and the IRS published proposed regulations in August 2026. They want to classify the refunded portions of key individual tax credits as federal public benefits. These include the Earned Income Credit, Child Tax Credit, American Opportunity Tax Credit, and Adoption Tax Credit. They are doing this under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. This is not about saving money. It is about punishing people who carry the heaviest load for the least reward.

Consider the people who use an Individual Tax Identification Number to do right by the law. The National Taxpayer Advocate found 3.8 million tax returns used an ITIN. According to IRS data covered by PBS and Fox News, taxpayers who filed those returns paid $14.4 billion in income taxes. They also paid $6.5 billion in Social Security and Medicare taxes. They pay in, year after year, without complaining about the lack of standing.

Now, the administration wants to strip them of the credits that keep their children fed. A research paper from Boston University, Columbia University, and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy studied this. They estimate that 309,000 children would lose the Earned Income Tax Credit. Another 574,000 children would lose the Additional Child Tax Credit. Worst of all, the researchers found that most children losing eligibility for these credits are U.S. citizens.

This policy affects people covered under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. It also affects those with temporary protected status and temporary workers on H1-B visas. Undocumented taxpayers face an impossible, cruel choice. They can declare they are not authorized to live in the country. They can commit a felony by lying. Or they can stop filing taxes altogether.

The machinery of cruelty

We have seen this machinery before. Last year, the Treasury Department agreed to share confidential taxpayer information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This turned the tax agency into a feeder system for deportation squads. A federal judge blocked that agreement because it violated privacy laws. But the IRS had already provided ICE with the addresses of 47,000 people, as detailed by PBS.

Now, the administration is trying to achieve the same end through the front door of the Form 1040. Talking Points Memo noted this effort. The Census Bureau has even proposed using these tax records to redefine residency. This would narrow the population count to shift political power.

Senate Democrats urged the IRS to drop the immigration question. They wrote in letters tracked by Bloomberg Government News that the question sabotages voluntary tax compliance. They warned it undermines the core tax collection responsibilities of the agency. Yet the administration seems ready to deliver the agency over to the demagogues.

Defenders of this rule argue that federal benefits should go only to those with full legal standing. They point to the welfare laws of the 1990s as their justification. But tax filing is not a welfare office. It is an accounting of labor. These workers have already paid in billions of dollars that built our roads, schools, and safety nets. You cannot demand a worker's earnings with one hand and hand their address to ICE with the other.

The Trump administration is deliberately weaponizing the tax code to terrorize immigrant families. They are stripping children of basic support. They must be stopped before every kitchen table in America becomes a site of state surveillance.

The Trump administration is turning the IRS into a border checkpoint

A tax form built for surveillance

The cost paid by working families

The machinery of cruelty

Sources