A crowd of immigrants and immigrant rights advocates gathered on the steps of San Francisco City Hall on Tuesday to condemn the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Internal Revenue Service’s agreement to share private taxpayer information with each other.
One San Francisco supervisor who attended the rally also introduced a resolution at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting to reaffirm the city’s commitment to oppose developing a registry that gathers information on residents’ national origin and religion.
Representatives from the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, immigrant rights groups, and several San Francisco supervisors spoke out at Tuesday’s rally on Tax Day to reaffirm the city’s commitment to protecting undocumented migrants and oppose the MOU between the two federal agencies.
“On what should be an extremely normal day on our calendar, Tax Day, April 15, is instead now a sense of stress, anxiety and consternation for the communities that make up the backbone of our city,” San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood said in a speech.
Since 1996, undocumented immigrants and U.S. workers without Social Security numbers have been able to pay taxes with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number.
Immigrant rights advocates argue that the agreement allowing the IRS to provide information of certain taxpayers to ICE has caused many undocumented immigrants to hesitate filing taxes this year out of fear of facing deportation.
In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in taxes to federal, state and local governments. In California, undocumented workers raised $8.5 billion from paying taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, an organization that researches and analyzes tax policies.
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