Fleeing starvation and hyperinflation, Venezuelan single mother Doralis said she and her children crossed the deadly Darien Gap jungle and traversed seven countries before reaching Nogales, Sonora, last spring. She and her sons, now 12 and 17, waited for months in the border town to get permission to enter the U.S. legally and seek humanitarian protection, they said.
Working at a carnicería and renting a small apartment in Nogales, Doralis checked the Biden-era “CBP One” phone application every day for eight months, in hopes of getting an appointment at the DeConcini Port of Entry through the government-recommended pathway.
In December, the family got their appointment, passed a credible-fear screening, and entered the U.S. with temporary parole status, and up to one year to file their asylum claim.
Now living in Tucson, four months later, Doralis wonders if it was all for nothing, as the Trump administration has moved to revoke parole protections issued under President Joe Biden and deport migrants like Doralis, who followed all the rules and used CBP One to enter the U.S.
“I feel desperate. Everything is so tangled up,” said Doralis, speaking in Spanish. She asked the Arizona Daily Star only to use her first name for fear of deportation. In Tucson, “I’m afraid to even go out on the street. If they took my children away from me, I would go crazy. ... It’s like I’m between a rock and a hard place.”
Migrants who entered the U.S. legally through Biden-era parole programs are increasingly in the crosshairs of immigration authorities, amid the Trump administration’s push for mass deportations.
“Canceling these paroles is a promise kept to the American people to secure our borders and protect national security,” the U.S. Department of Homeland Security told the Associated Press on Monday.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is also targeting millions of undocumented immigrants who pay taxes to the Internal Revenue Service each year, through an unprecedented information-sharing agreement with the U.S. Treasury Department.
Advocates say it’s another example of President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcers going after immigrants who are trying to do the right thing, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents struggle to meet arrest quotas.
Todd Lyons, acting ICE director, said Tuesday the IRS information would be used by DHS “strictly for the major criminal cases,” the AP reported.
‘Leave immediately’
Although the Trump administration has said its deportation campaign would focus on dangerous criminals, over the past week DHS has been sending notices to an unknown number of legal migrants who used CBP One, telling them to “leave immediately” or “the federal government will find you.” The message threatens fines and penalties for each day those don’t leave the U.S. voluntarily, unless they found another legal basis for staying.
Advocates say the notices appear aimed at scaring CBP One users into self-deporting, even if they actually have protection from deportation.
“The notice itself has very aggressive language,” said Pedro De Velasco, director of education and advocacy for binational migrant-aid nonprofit Kino Border Initiative. “It’s cruel, it’s inhumane. It’s just terrorizing people into leaving.”
Advocates are scrambling to figure out who exactly is affected by the DHS notice. More than 900,000 people entered the U.S. through ports of entry after getting appointments via CBP One. They were generally given a notice to appear in court, and had one year to make their application for asylum, or another form of protection, such as Temporary Protected Status, advocates say.
Migrants who entered the U.S. with CBP One should mostly have open court cases, which would require a judge’s ruling before they could be deported, said Jesse Evans-Schroeder, a Tucson immigration attorney.
DHS has not responded to the Star’s request for clarification on exceptions to the legal-status revocations for CBP One users, nor has it said how many beneficiaries are affected.
Attorneys are still trying to understand the implications of the DHS notice, as well as how far the Trump administration will go in disregarding immigration law and due process.
“We’re all trying to figure out what the bottom line is on it,” Tucson immigration attorney Mo Goldman said. “Right now anything is possible, unfortunately. I mean, we’re seeing people being summarily deported without proper vetting, we’re seeing students losing their visa status right and left, people getting their parole authorization revoked. The courts are the last resort right now.”
The Trump administration has admitted to wrongly sending a Maryland man with protected status to a notorious El Salvador prison last month, without due process. Justice Department lawyers cited an “administrative error” in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s case, yet argued in court that the U.S. had no power to bring the man home. (The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the federal government must take steps to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return.)
Asylum seekers who entered the U.S. through CBP One “feel betrayed by this government,” said Tucson migrant advocate Dora Rodriguez. She said the dozens of migrant families assisted by her Tucson nonprofit, Salvavision, have received the DHS notices, including a Nicaraguan family with three children and a Salvadoran man with an open asylum case.
“They waited, some of them for a year, to do things right, like this government asked them to do,” Rodriguez said. Many are “terrified” at what might happen if they stay to fight for asylum, she said.
“They see the news. They see how people have been disappearing,” Rodriguez said. “They see how people have been incarcerated in El Salvador and Guantanamo Bay,” without due process.
That’s just what Doralis fears: that, despite following the rules set forth by the U.S., she could be detained and separated from her children after their long search for safety, she said.
“I’m the mother and the father for my sons,” the single mother said. “I’m not going to wait until immigration is on top of me, handcuffing me as if I’m a criminal. I’m not a criminal. I’d rather leave of my own free will.”
But Doralis said she has no good options: Returning to a Venezuela that’s still “in crisis” is impossible, she said. Mexico is dangerous for migrants, who risk kidnapping and extortion by organized crime groups, sometimes in collusion with Mexican authorities, human rights advocates say. Doralis hasn’t yet been able to start her asylum petition, which in theory would prevent her deportation, because she’s struggled to find a lawyer.
“I would have liked to stay in the U.S.,” Doralis said. “But with everything President Trump is doing, what hope can there be here? None.”
The expanded use of CBP One, starting in early 2023, was the centerpiece of the Biden administration’s “carrot and stick” approach to immigration, aimed at encouraging legal immigration at ports of entry, scheduled through CBP One, and enhancing penalties for border crossings outside the ports, amid a global boom in migration in 2023.
Trump ended CBP One’s appointment system for new entrants the day he took office, canceling all existing appointments, even those scheduled for that same afternoon, and leaving thousands stranded in Mexico.
Venezuelan nationals Doralis, right, and her 12-year-old son Jesús outside their home in Tucson on Thursday. Doralis and her sons, Jesús, and César, 17, entered the country legally in December 2024, after waiting eight months in Mexico to obtain a CBP One appointment at the Nogales port of entry.
Taxpayers targeted, too
Also in the past week, the U.S. Treasury Department reached an agreement with DHS to share IRS data about undocumented immigrants who pay taxes, which advocates say raises privacy concerns for all taxpayers, including U.S. citizens, who entrust the revenue agency with sensitive financial and personal data.
Experts say the information-sharing agreement — which has prompted a top IRS official to resign, the AP reported Wednesday — will cause a significant decline in U.S. tax revenue, which is bolstered by millions of undocumented immigrants who paid nearly $97 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022, according to the left-leaning nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, or ITEP.
That includes $25.7 billion for Social Security and $6.4 billion for Medicare, programs for which undocumented workers are not eligible themselves.
“It’s just going to sow more distrust and lead to reduced compliance with tax laws,” said Marco Guzman, ITEP senior policy analyst.
Tom Bowman, policy counsel for the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, called the DHS-IRS collaboration “dystopian” and “reckless” in an interview with the Star.
“Federal tax privacy laws are some of the strictest federal privacy laws we have on the books,” he said. “If the IRS is basically cracking open its vault for immigration enforcement, every federal privacy law is suddenly on shaky ground. Tomorrow it could be your health care records, or my student loans, or someone’s benefit files. Everything is on fire at that point.”
For Mexican nationals Andrea and Daniel, who met in Tucson 22 years ago while working at a McDonalds, the news that DHS is seeking IRS data on undocumented immigrants threatens to dismantle the life they’ve built in Tucson, where they own a home and have raised their two U.S. citizen children, now 19 and 21.
Both are undocumented: Daniel entered Arizona through the Sonoran Desert in 2002, and Andrea overstayed a tourist visa. But they have been paying their taxes for almost two decades, said Andrea, a housekeeper, and Daniel, a handyman. The Star is only publishing the couples’ first names, due to their fear of deportation.
Andrea, an Hermosillo native, said they want to file their taxes to have a record of their earnings and contributions that could help their case, if immigration reforms one day allow them to seek legal status.
But they also pay taxes out of a sense of civic responsibility.
Andrea and Daniel in their Tucson backyard on Friday. The couple, both undocumented immigrants from Sonora, met in Tucson while working at McDonalds 22 years ago. They’ve raised their two U.S. citizen children together and own a home here. The couple, who work as a housekeeper and a handyman, also say they’ve been proud taxpayers for nearly 20 years. But news that the U.S. Treasury Department has reached an agreement to share taxpayer information with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to aid in the agency’s search for undocumented immigrants, threatens to upend the life they’ve built here.
“It’s our obligation as residents here,” Andrea said in Spanish.
“It’s a way to give back a little of what you generate,” said Daniel, who is from Huatabampo, Sonora. “That money is used for schools and services. It’s a way of saying, ‘OK, I want to be here in the United States; let’s do things the way they should be done, so they see I’m contributing to this country.’”
If their tax data led DHS to deport them, “All our dreams would fall apart, the dream of staying in this country legally and doing things correctly,” Andrea said.
DHS response
The Star submitted five questions to DHS about the move to obtain IRS taxpayer data and privacy concerns it raises. The agency responded Thursday with an emailed statement, attributed to “a DHS senior official.”
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the government is finally doing what it should have all along: sharing information across the federal government to solve problems,” the statement read. “Biden not only allowed millions of illegal aliens to flood into our country — he lost them due to incompetence and improper processing. Information sharing across agencies is essential to identify who is in our country, including violent criminals, determine what public safety and terror threats may exist so we can neutralize them, scrub these individuals from voter rolls, as well as identify what public benefits these aliens are using at the American taxpayer expense.”
The IRS did not respond to the Star’s emailed questions, including how the agency can assure U.S. citizen taxpayers that their data is safe with the IRS.
Matching data from disparate agencies is a deceptively complex process, vulnerable to mistakes, said Elizabeth Laird, director for equity in civic technology at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
“Imagine the number of people who will be falsely identified as someone who should be targeted for immigration action, and that happening in an environment where there is little to no due process,” she said. “Any of us could be wrongly targeted.”
The move comes as the Trump administration seeks to integrate more information systems across the federal government, dismantling the firewalls between agencies that are critical to protecting all Americans’ personal data, and respecting limits on how it can be used, privacy advocates said.
An executive order Trump signed March 20 says, “Removing unnecessary barriers to Federal employees accessing Government data and promoting inter‑agency data sharing are important steps toward eliminating bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency while enhancing the Government’s ability to detect overpayments and fraud.”
“It’s not happening in a vacuum,” Laird said of the IRS sharing data with DHS. “There are efforts underway to not only share data more broadly across federal agencies, but also to collect data that states have never provided to the federal government, to feed into this compilation of personal data by the federal government that we have never seen before.”
Tax revenue impact
The IRS has historically encouraged undocumented immigrants to file taxes, with assurances that their data would be safe. The IRS issues Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers, or ITINs, so undocumented immigrants and others without Social Security numbers who own property or otherwise earn money in the U.S. can pay taxes.
Undocumented immigrants contribute nearly $60 billion annually in federal taxes, and $37 billion in state and local taxes, according to ITEP.
If only 10% of undocumented taxpayers stop paying their taxes out of fear of deportation, Arizona stands to lose more than $10 million annually in state and local taxes, according to estimates in a new report from ITEP.
If 50% of undocumented immigrants stop paying taxes, Arizona could lose $51 million in annual tax revenues, the report estimates.
The Yale Budget Lab estimated $66 billion in federal tax contributions by undocumented immigrants in 2023. The nonpartisan policy-research center warned in a Wednesday report that the IRS data-sharing agreement could lead to a $313 billion drop in tax revenues over the next decade, as undocumented immigrants lose faith in the IRS.
For undocumented immigrants, paying taxes “can be used to demonstrate financial responsibility for future immigration proceedings,” Bowman said. “Immigration justice advocates have been telling immigrants for years and years, ‘File your taxes, it can help you out and it won’t be used against you.’ The way the administration has turned this (tax privacy law) on its head makes all of that advice questionable.”
Tucson handyman Daniel agrees fewer immigrants will pay their taxes going forward, though he and Andrea will continue to do so, since their information is already on record.
The attack on hard-working immigrants who pay into the system doesn’t make sense, he said.
“I know we entered this country on the wrong foot, but well, that has always existed here. It’s not something new,” he said. “We didn’t come to commit crimes, we didn’t come to steal. We are doing our best for this country.”
