A newly uncovered Biden White House memo reveals the outgoing administration plotted to extend Temporary Protected Status to more than three million illegal immigrants, a move its own authors admitted was designed to obstruct President Trump's deportation agenda.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, the Missouri Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, obtained the January 2025 memo from Archivist of the United States Edward Forst and shared its contents with Fox News Digital. The document, produced by Biden's senior advisors in the administration's final days, laid out a blueprint for granting or extending Temporary Protected Status, a federal program that shields foreign nationals from deportation when their home countries face crises, to populations from at least seven countries. One week after the memo was transmitted, Biden extended TPS protections for nearly one million noncitizens.
The memo did not just propose a massive expansion. It openly acknowledged the strategy behind it: tying the incoming Trump administration's hands through years of litigation. And it admitted that Biden's own team understood the legal vulnerabilities involved.
The memo's language left little room for interpretation. It told Biden that granting TPS "will potentially protect many vulnerable people from President-elect Trump's planned mass deportations," and noted that pro-migrant advocates "are prepared to litigate efforts to terminate or slow down the implementation of TPS for specified nations by the Trump Administration." In other words, the outgoing White House was not simply extending humanitarian protections. It was constructing a legal barrier designed to survive the transition of power.
The document also catalogued the first Trump administration's failed attempts to terminate TPS designations for Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti, El Salvador, Nepal, and Honduras. Courts had issued preliminary injunctions blocking those efforts. But the memo conceded a critical point: those court victories for advocates came "due in large part to [the Trump administration's] failure to produce a factual record in support of termination, which is something that could be rectified."
That concession matters. Biden's own advisors acknowledged that the legal shield they were building might not hold if Trump's team did the paperwork correctly the second time around. They pressed forward anyway.
Schmitt did not hold back. Speaking to Fox News Digital, the senator framed the memo as a direct attempt to override the results of the 2024 election, in which voters chose Trump and his promise to restore immigration enforcement.
"After the American people voted for President Trump's promise to end the TPS scam, the Biden administration tried to subvert the will of the American people. This was mass amnesty-by-decree. America is for Americans, and it is our home, it is not a permanent refugee camp."
Schmitt pointed to a chart embedded in the memo that estimated the populations eligible for new TPS designations: roughly 1.5 million Guatemalans, 600,000 Ecuadorians, 464,000 Nicaraguans, 455,000 Venezuelans, and smaller populations from Ukraine, Sudan, and Afghanistan. Schmitt said those figures totaled more than 3.1 million people.
The scale of what was contemplated is worth pausing on. TPS was created to offer temporary relief to nationals of countries hit by armed conflict, environmental disasters, or other extraordinary conditions. It was never designed as a permanent residency program, and it was certainly never designed to absorb 3.1 million people at once in the final weeks of a lame-duck presidency.
The pattern of Biden-era revelations continues to widen. Former DNC fundraiser Lindy Li has pledged to name Democrats who hid Biden's cognitive decline, raising broader questions about what the outgoing administration concealed from the public and when.
The memo revealed that Biden's senior team had received requests for TPS-related actions from at least eight Democratic senators: Michael Bennet of Colorado, Catherine Cortez-Masto of Nevada, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Richard Durbin and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, and Alex Padilla of California. The memo noted that "some stakeholders" were specifically requesting new TPS designations for nationals of Ecuador and Guatemala, countries that had never before been covered by the program.
The involvement of those senators raises its own questions. Were they coordinating with the White House on a strategy they knew would face legal challenges? Did they understand the memo's explicit acknowledgment that TPS applications take six months to process, meaning any mass designation in the final weeks of Biden's term could not have been fully implemented before Trump took office on January 20, 2025?
Schmitt seized on that contradiction. He told Fox News that "the most disturbing part" was that "Biden's 'Senior Advisors' recommended he create 2.1 million NEW TPS designees in the last few weeks of his presidency, despite admitting TPS applications take 6 months." The math does not work for any purpose other than creating a legal obstacle for the next president.
The full scope of the memo's proposals was never implemented. But Biden did not leave quietly, either. Approximately one week after the memo was produced, he extended TPS protections for nearly one million noncitizens. That action represented a concrete down payment on the strategy the memo outlined.
The memo also reminded Biden of the TPS protections he had already granted during his term: to Afghans, Cameroonians, Ethiopians, people from Burma, Lebanese nationals, Ukrainians, and Venezuelans. He had repeatedly extended protections for Haitians as well. Biden's administration had resolved Trump-era TPS litigation by either redesignating Haiti for the program or rescinding Trump's earlier terminations outright.
This is not the only instance of the Biden administration's final-days maneuvering coming to light. A federal judge recently denied Biden's effort to suppress ghostwriter recordings, another example of the former president fighting to keep his administration's internal workings hidden from public view.
Schmitt, in floor remarks, compared the TPS strategy to a homeowner dealing with squatters. He argued that Americans would not try to delay enforcement against trespassers on their own property, and he called the broader approach a "get-rich-quick scheme for the third world." The senator also alleged that Biden's plan would have "protect[ed] Tren de Aragua members", a reference to the Venezuelan gang, though it remains unclear whether the memo itself named that organization or whether that characterization was Schmitt's own.
Fox News Digital reported that it reached out to Biden and a former Biden official for comment on the memo. No response was included in the reporting. The silence is notable given the document's specificity, this was not a leaked rumor or an anonymous tip. It was an internal White House memorandum obtained through the Archivist of the United States by a sitting senator exercising his subcommittee authority.
The memo itself carried an apparent error: Schmitt said it was erroneously dated "2024" despite being produced in January 2025. The exact authorship, which office or named official within the White House drafted it, remains unclear.
Former DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has since admitted Biden should have cracked down on the border sooner, after years of insisting the border was secure. The TPS memo fits the same pattern: an administration that spent four years expanding protections for illegal immigrants, then scrambled in its final days to make those expansions as difficult as possible to reverse.
Meanwhile, separate reporting has revealed that Biden's FBI wired a Newsom associate months before Trump took office, adding to the picture of an outgoing administration that used its remaining time in power to entrench its priorities and complicate the incoming president's agenda.
Schmitt summed up the stakes plainly:
"My investigation uncovered that the Lame Duck Biden White House tried to keep millions of illegal aliens in our country by abusing the 'Temporary' Protected Status program."
The word "temporary" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in a program that Biden's team tried to make permanent by design. When an outgoing administration writes a memo admitting its own legal strategy might fail, and pushes ahead anyway to saddle its successor with years of court fights, the word for that is not governance. It is sabotage by paperwork.