The Internal Revenue Service will assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement in finding illegal immigrants, according to a court filing on Monday.

The deal stipulates ICE officials can ask the agency for information about people who have been ordered to leave the United States or who they are investigating.

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The IRS could then turn over tax information with earnings, addresses, and other information concerning the subjects ICE is probing. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem signed the agreement.

“The bases for this (memorandum of understanding) are founded in longstanding authorities granted by Congress, which serve to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans while streamlining the ability to pursue criminals,” a Treasury spokesperson said in a statement to CNN.

Some illegal immigrants do pay taxes in order to comply with the law and to build their case toward becoming legal residents, among other reasons. They use ITINs, or individual taxpayer identification numbers, to file taxes in the absence of a Social Security number. “Most experts believe that the vast majority of tax returns filed with ITINs today are filed by undocumented immigrants,” the Bipartisan Policy Center said in 2018.

Information from the IRS being used to investigate and deport illegal immigrants is “unprecedented,” former IRS official Nina Olson told the New York Times. The plan will likely boost ICE’s deportation efforts.

The deal maintains that the plan will adhere to laws concerning what IRS data can and cannot be shared. “Each request must be made consistent” with the tax code, and ICE will “ensure the proper handling, transmission, safeguarding, and security” of the information it receives.

There’s concern illegal immigrants will not pay their taxes in fear of disclosing information to the IRS that could be used by ICE.

Public advocacy groups previously expressed concern about a deal between the IRS and ICE. Public Citizen, a nonprofit advocacy organization, sued to stop the plan. The group’s attorneys said it “threatens to usurp Congress’s authority to decide when and on what terms confidential IRS information can be used by other agencies.”

Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA), whose father was an immigrant from Mexico, trashed the deal.

“The IRS should NEVER be weaponized to target immigrant families. This backdoor deal with ICE shatters decades of trust—and may be illegal,” he said in a post on X. “I serve on the [Ways and Means Committee]. I will fight this with everything I’ve got. No one should fear that filing taxes puts their family at risk.”

Despite the concern behind ICE using IRS data in deportation investigations, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick says the deal appears to be limited to criminal investigations and not deportation queries.

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“There are many questions raised about this new agreements, which seems to violate previous understandings of the laws requiring IRS not to share taxpayer information,” he said in a post on X.

“But at its heart it does not seem that the MOU permits ICE to ask for taxpayer data for deportation reasons…It seems primarily to be aimed at criminal investigations for willful failure to depart after the issuance of a removal order, a crime on the books which (until now) is virtually never prosecuted,” he added.