Section 6103, on Trial: A Unanimous Court Just Told the President His MoU Isn’t a Law
The D.C. Circuit affirmed an injunction blocking the IRS from feeding taxpayer addresses to ICE — a scheme built not on a statute Congress passed, but on a memorandum the executive branch wrote to itself. The ruling is more than a legal defeat. It is a diagnosis.
On September 8, 2026, three federal appellate judges did something the modern Republican Party has spent a decade insisting judges must not do: they read a statute Congress wrote, applied it to what the executive branch had actually done, and concluded that the executive branch had broken the law tens of thousands of times. In Center for Taxpayer Rights v. IRS, a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld a preliminary injunction that halts the Trump administration’s automated procedure for handing taxpayer addresses to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. By the time the district court froze the pipeline, the IRS had already transmitted roughly 47,289 records. A trial-court judge had already found that approximately 42,695 of those disclosures violated federal privacy law.
The number is not the story. The mechanism is. This scheme was never authorized by Congress. It was authorized by a Memorandum of Understanding — a private handshake between two federal departments — that the administration treated as if it had the force of statute. The court’s answer, in effect, was that a memo cannot rewrite a law. And the law it tried to rewrite was written for one reason: to prevent a president from doing precisely what this president is trying to do.
I. “Weak Sauce” and the Watergate Line
Judge Cornelia Pillard’s 32-page opinion, joined by Judges Patricia Millett and Robert L. Wilkins, opens with a history lesson the administration would rather Americans forget. As the ruling’s first paragraph explains, Congress enacted 26 U.S.C. § 6103 after Watergate exposed how a sitting president could weaponize tax records against political enemies. The rule Congress wrote is simple: your tax return and return information are confidential, and the IRS may share them with another agency only under narrow, statutorily specified conditions.
The administration’s Data-Exchange Procedure, the court found, did not meet those conditions — and more than 90 percent of ICE’s disclosures came from matching a taxpayer identification number rather than confirming a real address. According to court filings, the automated system required only that ICE’s address field contain five or nine digits. Those digits did not have to constitute an actual ZIP code. Placeholder entries such as “00000” were treated as valid.
When the government complained that the injunction was “highly unusual and harmful” and would obstruct enforcement, Judge Pillard replied with a phrase now traveling well beyond legal circles. That argument, she wrote, was “weak sauce” — because the district court had already permitted the IRS to file any sensitive notifications under seal. Any gripe with the underlying rules, the panel observed, belongs to Congress, not the court. The right-wing outrage machine attacked the phrase. It did not attack the reasoning. There was none available to attack.
“After the Watergate scandal exposed executive branch abuses of U.S. taxpayers’ information to harass the Administration’s enemies, Congress enacted a prohibition against the IRS sharing tax return information with any other federal agency unless the requesting agency meets stringent conditions.”
— Judge Cornelia Pillard · Opening of the D.C. Circuit opinion, Sept. 8, 2026
II. What a Memorandum of Understanding Actually Is
To understand why this ruling matters far beyond the immigration debate, Americans need to understand a piece of bureaucratic plumbing the administration has quietly turned into a policymaking weapon: the Memorandum of Understanding, or MoU.
In its ordinary and legitimate use, an MoU is a housekeeping document. Two federal agencies with overlapping authority — say, the FBI and a state police agency sharing forensic lab resources — sign a written arrangement that says, in plain language, “we will do the following administrative things when we work together.” An MoU does not create new legal authority. It documents how existing legal authority will be exercised.
The Trump administration has inverted this. When the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security executed their April 7, 2025 MoU, they were not documenting how to carry out a power Congress had granted. They were building, from thin air, a procedure to circumvent a statute Congress specifically wrote to prevent this behavior. Holland & Knight’s legal analysis described the arrangement as “unprecedented.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation, examining the redacted 15-page document, called it a weaponization of taxpayer data.
Why an MoU instead of a bill? Because a bill requires votes. It requires debate. It requires the president to convince a majority of the House and 60 senators that his idea of using tax records to hunt immigrants is defensible. The president cannot do that. Not even his own Acting IRS Commissioner, Melanie Krause, would sign onto it — she resigned in protest when the deal was executed. So the administration reached for a piece of paper it could sign by itself, called it an “understanding,” and pretended the understanding rewrote the law.
It is an end run around Article I of the Constitution, which vests all legislative power in Congress. And it is not confined to one agency.
III. The IRS-ICE Deal, in Plain Language
The MoU signed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s IRS and DHS on April 7, 2025 permits ICE to submit requests for the names, addresses, and tax data of individuals ICE claims are under final orders of removal or are subject to a “criminal investigation” — a category the administration has quietly expanded to include the noncriminal act of remaining in the country beyond 90 days. On paper, the agreement points to a narrow exception in Section 6103(i)(2) of the Internal Revenue Code that permits limited disclosure to a law-enforcement employee “personally and directly engaged” in a specific criminal investigation.
In practice, according to court filings summarized by The Mindful Federal Employee and the Congressional Research Service, ICE submitted mass bulk requests — reportedly seeking data on as many as 1.28 million people — that could not possibly have originated with an agent personally engaged in a specific criminal case. The IRS built an automated pipeline to answer these bulk requests. The pipeline did not verify identifying information. It did not verify addresses. It matched tax IDs and shipped records.
The data was intended, plainly, for one purpose: to locate people for deportation. The National Immigration Forum reported that DHS officials floated using the agreement to help locate up to seven million undocumented immigrants — including the roughly 8.7 million people who have lived, worked, and paid taxes in the United States for more than fifteen years.
IV. How This Reaches the Average American
Every Filer Is Affected
Undocumented immigrants pay roughly $90 billion a year in federal, state, and local taxes. Deterring them from filing shifts the burden onto every other taxpayer, per the National Immigration Forum.
Precedent Broken
Written after Watergate to stop a president from turning the IRS on his enemies. The MoU treated this Congressional prohibition as an obstacle to route around, not a rule to obey.
The Error Rate
Over 90 percent of the 47,289 disclosures relied on tax ID matches without confirming an accurate address — meaning U.S. citizens and lawful residents were almost certainly caught up in the sweep, per the D.C. Circuit’s findings.
Trust, Once Broken
For nearly fifty years, the IRS’s implicit compact with every filer — citizen or not — was that your tax information stays with the IRS. That compact was signed by Congress. The MoU tore it up without consulting the signatory.
The consequences are not confined to any one community. When people believe filing a tax return may be used to deport a neighbor, tax compliance falls. When tax compliance falls, federal revenue falls. When federal revenue falls, the shortfall is made up by someone — and it will not be made up by the wealthiest, whose tax cuts this administration has fought to preserve.
V. This Is Not an Isolated MoU
The IRS-ICE agreement is one node in a much larger project. In March 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14243, “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos,” which directed federal agencies to give the executive branch “unfettered access” to data from state programs receiving federal funding. That order — not a statute — became the founding document for a sweeping data consolidation the Brennan Center for Justice describes as an attempt to build a “master database” at the Department of Homeland Security.
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Each of these actions shares a structural feature: the executive branch declared, on its own authority, that walls Congress built between agencies were bureaucratic inefficiencies rather than deliberate legal protections. Each was accomplished not by legislation, but by an executive order, an MoU, or an internal instruction. The pattern is the point.
VI. What Congress Is Doing — and Isn’t
The Democrats in Congress have not been quiet, and the record deserves to be stated plainly. In March 2026, Senators Alex Padilla and Catherine Cortez Masto, joined by Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat and Representatives Linda Sánchez and Jimmy Gomez, led 115 House and Senate Democrats in a bicameral amicus brief before the D.C. Circuit arguing that the MoU violated Section 6103. In July, Padilla and Cortez Masto led 85 more Democrats in a parallel amicus brief before the First Circuit, in the Massachusetts case. Senator Padilla called the data-sharing “dangerous, un-American, and illegal.” Representative Richard Neal, ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, has pressed the IRS CEO in open committee hearings on compliance with the injunctions.
What Democrats have not been able to do, in a Congress the president’s party controls, is pass legislation forcing the administration to stand down. That is the tell. Every MoU signed to bypass Congress is a bet that the courts will move too slowly and the majority in Congress will not act. The bet has paid off, so far, with everything except the courts.
The Republican majority’s silence is the second half of this story. A president who governs by MoU is a president who is not being restrained by his own party’s leadership in the branch that is supposed to restrain him. The Framers did not design a system in which the legislature waits politely for the executive to break the law and then hopes the judiciary catches him. They designed a system in which Congress speaks first, loudest, and last.
The 25th Amendment Is Not About Age. It Is About Whether the Officeholder Can Discharge the Office.
Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment provides that the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet — or a body established by Congress — may declare a sitting president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” The Vice President then immediately assumes those duties as Acting President. The mechanism is narrow. It is also real, and it exists precisely for a moment in which the person in the Oval Office demonstrates, through a pattern of conduct, that he does not understand or does not intend to honor the office he holds.
The oath of office in Article II, Section 1 is not decorative. It requires the president to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” A president who governs by MoU when he cannot govern by statute — who directs the IRS to disregard a post-Watergate privacy law and treats a federal court’s injunction as a nuisance — is not preserving the Constitution. He is testing which parts of it are enforceable.
In April 2026, House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) wrote to the White House physician demanding a formal cognitive and neurological evaluation of the president. Raskin later introduced legislation to establish the Commission on Presidential Capacity contemplated by Section 4 itself. Representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) and Jasmine Crockett (D-Tex.) have separately called on Vice President Vance and the Cabinet to invoke the amendment.
The Constitutional Argument
The argument is not that this administration’s policies are wrong, though many of them are. It is that the pattern of conduct — signing MoUs to override statutes, ignoring privacy laws written after Watergate, directing agencies to defy the specific requirements of Section 6103, and treating court orders as obstacles to negotiate around — demonstrates an inability, or an unwillingness, to discharge the duties of the office as the Constitution defines them. “Unable” in the Twenty-Fifth Amendment does not mean only “comatose.” It means unable, through incapacity or through refusal, to execute the office faithfully.
The Practical Barriers, Honestly Stated
The barriers are real, and pretending otherwise serves no one. Section 4 requires the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet — officials the president himself appointed — to declare him unfit. This Vice President will not do so. This Cabinet will not do so. Raskin’s Commission legislation cannot pass a Republican House. Even the fallback path in Section 4, in which Congress itself may resolve a dispute, requires a two-thirds vote of both chambers.
Why the Barriers Do Not Negate the Case
The barriers are political, not constitutional. The constitutional case for accountability does not depend on whether the current officeholders have the courage to enforce it. It depends on whether the case itself is sound. The D.C. Circuit has now told us, unanimously, that a core piece of this administration’s operating model is unlawful. The court did not merely block a policy. It documented a president who tried to substitute a private memo for a public statute. That is the record. It will remain the record whether or not this Congress acts on it, and it is the record on which every future Congress will judge whether Section 4 was meant for moments precisely like this one.
VII. What This Ruling Really Says About Priorities
Every president chooses where to spend political capital. This president spent his on an MoU to feed taxpayer addresses to a deportation force. He did not spend it on health care, on infrastructure, on the economy of the working people whose taxes fund the very database he wanted to weaponize. He spent it on a scheme so legally indefensible that his own Acting IRS Commissioner resigned rather than sign it, and that a unanimous panel of federal judges — regardless of who nominated them — has now called out for what it is.
Leadership is revealed by choices under constraint. Confronted with a statute Congress passed to protect taxpayers, this administration’s choice was to route around it. Confronted with a district court injunction, its choice was to appeal with an argument the appellate court dismissed as “weak sauce.” Confronted with a Section 6103 written to prevent Watergate from happening again, its choice was to build a computer system that would let Watergate happen at scale, automatically, forty-seven thousand times.
“The IRS’s agreement to turn over massive amounts of sensitive taxpayer data to ICE is dangerous, un-American, and illegal.”
— Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) · Ranking Member, Senate Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee
Editorial Conclusion
The question raised by Center for Taxpayer Rights v. IRS is not whether the Trump administration’s immigration policy is popular. It is whether a president may substitute his signature on a memo for a vote of Congress. Three federal judges have now said, unanimously and unambiguously, that he may not.
What is on trial here is not one MoU. It is a theory of government in which the executive branch treats every statute as advisory, every court as an inconvenience, and every constitutional restraint as a bureaucratic silo to be eliminated. That theory is incompatible with the oath a president takes on January 20. The remedy for its enforcement is not partisan. It is constitutional. And the constitutional case does not become weaker because the political will to act on it is missing. It becomes more necessary.
Sources & References
- Thomson Reuters Tax News — D.C. Circuit blocks IRS from sharing taxpayer data with ICE (Sept. 2026)
- Hoodline — Appeals court says IRS illegally fed taxpayer addresses to ICE
- yourNEWS — D.C. Circuit calls administration objection “weak sauce”
- All Rise News — “Weak sauce”: IRS loses bid to share taxpayer info with ICE
- The Mindful Federal Employee — D.C. Circuit Blocks IRS-ICE Taxpayer Data Sharing — Section 6103 Explained
- Congress.gov / CRS — Updates on Litigation over the IRS-ICE Information-Sharing Agreement (Legal Sidebar LSB11413)
- Economic Policy Institute — ICE and IRS reach agreement to share taxpayer information (with full MoU)
- Electronic Frontier Foundation — IRS-ICE Data Sharing Agreement Betrays Data Privacy and Taxpayers’ Trust
- National Immigration Forum — IRS & ICE Immigration Data-Sharing Agreement: Explainer
- Holland & Knight — IRS and ICE Memorandum of Understanding Will Drive Tax Payroll Audits
- FedScoop — Democrats urge appeals court to keep block on ICE from using IRS data
- Sen. Alex Padilla — Padilla, Cortez Masto, CHC Members Lead Amicus Brief (March 31, 2026)
- Brennan Center for Justice — Dangers of the Trump Administration’s Data Consolidation Efforts
- The Hill — Trump administration’s knockdown of personal data barriers raises privacy alarms
- Center for American Progress — The Trump Administration Is Using Americans’ Sensitive Data to Build a Digital Watchtower
- CREW — The Trump admin wants to put your private data in one place. That’s illegal.
- House Judiciary Democrats — Ranking Member Raskin demands cognitive evaluation, cites 25th Amendment
- The Daily Beast — Trump, 79, faces Congressional bid to invoke 25th Amendment
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