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I do like how you’re slicing up the apples and oranges here to make a fruit salad, it does make arguing your viewpoint a whole lot easier.

Since taxes would have to originate in the House, I’m pretty sure we can count on that not happening. And while I certainly believe that there’s plenty of judges out there who really do enjoy fruit salad, the appellate level really does have to concentrate on the plate before them.

The holes in the argument are: Ample evidence exists in thousands (millions?) of court cases of money being transferred from the US to Mexico in support of drug trade. Ample evidence exists in the court records of hundreds if not thousands of cases where funds are being transferred to Mexico to evade US taxes. Ample evidence exists of widespread systematic terrorism in all parts of Mexico.

It is entirely a right and power of the executive to choose to ignore evidence or use evidence to support cutting off funds to Mexico (according to a very big body of rulings by SCOTUS.) And I don’t see five votes on SCOTUS to, even narrowing the ruling to specifically this one instance, to strip the executive of that power.

Roberts would say take it to congress, Thomas and Alito would side with the administration, Kennedy would berate the administration but still admit that it is theirs to determine. Even on the left side of the court, I think you’d have trouble finding votes saying that the administration must ignore ample evidence. Kagan and Sotomayor both believe in a strong executive, and deferral to judgment on mundane issues has been a continual theme in Ginsberg’s rulings. Bayer - well, anything and everything goes there, so call that the dissent.

Are you saying that every finding by the executive as to mundane matters such as countries which harbor terrorism, drug cartels and extensive tax evasion is subject to judicial review at their whim? No. Not every finding, though I think your usage of "mundane" is kind of amusing. Barring all monetary transfers to another country is not exactly "mundane".
Or would it just apply to Mexico because a president wants Mexico to build a wall?
Yes. In this context, it reveals the justification to be a sham, and I'll get to that in a bit.
But okay, if you're going for the argument that Trump may have the power to bar all remittances to Mexico under the Patriot Act, then I assume you'd agree that he has to bar them -- he can't just pull an arbitrary, permanent tax number out of the air and confiscate that much, right? Nothing in the Patriot Act authorizes that, and his proposed amendments to $31 CFR 130 don't change that. So since he himself has seemingly abandoned that tax idea now, and is moving to stopping all transfers, let's move on....

And there's a couple of other problems with that memo. The first is that he claims that the "majority" of the $24B in remittances come from illegals. I'm not aware of the evidence for that at all. I have had some run-ins with migrant workers, and those folks, more so than the ones who are trying to stay here permanently, are the ones most likely to send money home. And a lot of those migrants are here legally, working under the protection of the MSPA and various temporary work visas.

The bigger problem is that he's going with the idea that people have to show lawful residence before money can be transferred to Mexico, and hoping to amend that CFR provision in the process. Apart from the obvious work-around of simply giving the money to someone here lawfully and having them send it (rendering the whole thing a fairly hollow threat), the illegals will just give the same bogus documents to Western Union that they give to employers.