A newly uncovered Biden White House memo from January 2025 proposed expanding Temporary Protected Status to more than 3 million noncitizens, a move its own authors admitted was designed to block President Trump's deportation agenda.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, the Missouri Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, obtained the internal memo from Archivist of the United States Edward Forst and shared its contents with Fox News Digital. The document, written by Biden's unnamed "senior advisors" and addressed to the outgoing president, laid out a detailed plan to grant TPS, a designation meant to offer short-term refuge to nationals from countries hit by war or natural disaster, to millions of additional people before Trump took office on January 20, 2025.
The memo did not merely propose a humanitarian gesture. It openly acknowledged the political purpose: shielding illegal immigrants from the incoming administration's enforcement priorities and setting up years of litigation to slow Trump's hand. One week after the memo was drafted, Biden extended TPS protections for nearly 1 million noncitizens.
Schmitt did not hold back about what the document revealed. In a statement to Fox News Digital, he framed the memo as a last-ditch effort by a defeated administration to undermine the voters' decision in the 2024 election.
"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 senator went further, tying the proposed TPS expansion to specific security concerns and accusing the Biden team of attempting to entrench protections that would outlast the administration itself.
"Biden tried to turn TPS into a 3.1-million-person deportation shield, protect Tren de Aragua members, and trap President Trump in years of litigation."
Tren de Aragua is a Venezuelan criminal organization that has drawn growing law enforcement attention in the United States. Schmitt's claim that the memo would have protected its members appears to be his own characterization; the memo text quoted in the reporting does not name the group directly.
Schmitt also highlighted a specific number that stood out from the document's recommendations. Biden's senior advisors, he said, urged the creation of 2.1 million new TPS designees in the administration's final weeks, even though the memo itself acknowledged that TPS applications take six months to process. That gap between the timeline proposed and the timeline required raises an obvious question: was the goal to protect vulnerable people, or to create a bureaucratic and legal fait accompli that no successor could quickly undo?
The memo included a chart estimating the populations that could receive new TPS eligibility. The numbers were large. Roughly 1.5 million Guatemalans topped the list, followed by approximately 600,000 Ecuadorians, 464,000 Nicaraguans, and 455,000 Venezuelans. Smaller populations from Ukraine, Sudan, and Afghanistan rounded out the total, though exact figures for those groups were not specified in the reporting.
The document also reminded Biden of the TPS protections his administration had already granted, to nationals from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Burma, Lebanon, Ukraine, and Venezuela, and noted repeated extensions for Haitians. In other words, the January 2025 memo was not a fresh idea. It was the capstone of a four-year pattern of expanding a program originally designed as a narrow, temporary measure.
The Trump administration has moved aggressively on immigration enforcement since taking office, and the TPS program has been a central friction point. Trump sought during his first term to terminate TPS designations for nationals of Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti, El Salvador, Nepal, and Honduras. Courts blocked those efforts with preliminary injunctions, a fact the Biden memo cited approvingly.
One of the most revealing sections of the memo dealt with litigation strategy. The document acknowledged that courts had halted Trump's first-term TPS terminations, but it added an important caveat: those injunctions succeeded "in large part" because the Trump administration had failed to build a factual record supporting termination, "something that could be rectified." The Biden team, in other words, understood that the legal shield was not permanent. But the memo's authors argued that granting new TPS designations would force the incoming administration into fresh rounds of court battles.
The memo stated plainly that granting TPS "will potentially protect many vulnerable people from President-elect Trump's planned mass deportations." It added that advocates "argue that these protections are likely to hold in court, and they are prepared to litigate efforts to terminate or slow down the implementation of TPS for specified nations by the Trump Administration."
That language is worth reading twice. The outgoing administration was not merely weighing a policy option on its merits. It was explicitly gaming out how to tie up its successor in court, using a program whose very name includes the word "Temporary."
The Supreme Court has since weighed in. In a 6-3 ruling, the Court held that the Trump administration can terminate TPS for Haitian and Syrian migrants, delivering a significant legal victory for the current White House's immigration agenda. That decision undercuts the litigation strategy the Biden memo envisioned.
The memo also documented that Biden's senior team had received requests from multiple Democratic senators pushing for new or expanded TPS designations before Trump's inauguration. The senators named in the document were Michael Bennet of Colorado, Catherine Cortez-Masto of Nevada, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Richard Durbin of Illinois, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, and Alex Padilla of California.
The specific actions each senator requested were not detailed in the reporting. But the list itself tells a story: a coordinated push from the Democratic caucus to lock in immigration protections that voters had just rejected at the ballot box. The memo noted that "some stakeholders", beyond the senators, were also requesting TPS designations for nationals of Ecuador and Guatemala, the two largest new populations on the chart.
Schmitt described the broader effort in blunt terms during remarks shared with Fox News Digital, saying the United States should not be a "get-rich-quick scheme for the third world" and comparing the TPS expansion to allowing squatters to remain on someone's property while the owner fights them in court.
The memo itself was dated January 2025, though Schmitt noted it was "erroneously dated '2024.'" Whether that discrepancy was a clerical error or something more deliberate remains unclear. Fox News Digital reached out to Biden for comment; no response was included in the reporting.
The broader pattern of executive overreach in the Biden administration's final stretch extended well beyond immigration. The Trump White House has since moved to reverse what it considers Biden-era government overreach across multiple policy areas, from environmental prosecutions to federal spending controls.
Schmitt framed the memo as proof that the Biden administration tried to subvert the outcome of the 2024 election on immigration, the issue that polls consistently showed was a top concern for voters.
"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."
He added a pointed coda, noting that the most sweeping proposals in the memo were never implemented.
"The most disturbing part, 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."
Schmitt noted that deportations of Ecuadorians and Guatemalans, two of the largest populations the memo targeted for new TPS protections, are now proceeding under the current administration. "Luckily, that never happened and we have been deporting Ecuadorians and Guatemalans," he said.
The current administration has also pursued tighter controls on federal spending and verification systems, part of a broader push to close the gaps that allowed programs to expand without adequate oversight during the Biden years.
Several open questions remain. The identities of the "senior advisors" who authored the memo have not been disclosed. The specific requests made by each of the eight Democratic senators are unknown. And Biden himself has not publicly addressed the document.
What is clear from the memo's own language is this: the Biden White House knew its TPS expansions were politically motivated, knew they were designed to obstruct the incoming president, and knew the legal protections they offered were not guaranteed to survive judicial review. They moved forward anyway, not because the law required it, but because the election results demanded a rearguard action.
When an administration spends its final days building legal obstacles for its successor rather than governing, it tells you everything about whose interests it was serving, and they weren't the American people's.