A newly uncovered Biden White House memo from January 2025 reveals plans to extend Temporary Protected Status to more than 3 million noncitizens, a move one Republican senator calls a deliberate attempt to obstruct President Trump's immigration enforcement.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., obtained the internal memo through his authority as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution. Edward Forst, the Archivist of the United States, provided the document, which Schmitt disclosed to Fox News Digital. The memo, produced during Biden's final days in office and erroneously dated "2024" according to Schmitt, outlined how the outgoing administration could shield millions of foreign nationals from deportation by dramatically expanding TPS, a program originally designed as a short-term humanitarian measure.
One week after the memo was produced, Biden extended TPS protections for nearly 1 million noncitizens. But the document's ambitions went far beyond that. A chart embedded in the memo estimated potential new TPS eligibility for roughly 1.5 million Guatemalans, 600,000 Ecuadorians, 464,000 Nicaraguans, 455,000 Venezuelans, and smaller populations from Ukraine, Sudan, and Afghanistan. Schmitt put the total at 3.1 million.
The memo did not merely catalog options. Biden's "senior advisors" recommended creating 2.1 million new TPS designees in the administration's final weeks, even while acknowledging that TPS applications take six months to process, Schmitt said. The timing mattered. Biden had already lost the election. Voters had chosen Trump in part on his promise to end what Schmitt called "the TPS scam." Pushing through millions of new protections after that vote, with full knowledge that the incoming president intended to reverse course, amounted to a deliberate effort to tie Trump's hands.
Schmitt did not hold back about the memo's purpose:
"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."
The memo itself was explicit about the strategy's legal dimension. It told Biden that granting TPS "will potentially protect many vulnerable people from President-elect Trump's planned mass deportations." Biden's advisors argued that the 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."
In other words, the plan was not just to extend protections but to build a litigation wall around them, one designed to consume years of the new administration's time and resources. The former president's post-presidency legal and public battles have continued on multiple fronts, but this memo suggests the most consequential rearguard action was aimed squarely at immigration enforcement.
The memo drew heavily on the legal history of Trump's first term. During that period, the Trump administration attempted to terminate TPS designations for nationals of Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti, El Salvador, Nepal, and Honduras. Courts issued preliminary injunctions that blocked every one of those efforts. Pro-migrant advocates successfully argued that the administration had failed to produce a factual record supporting termination.
Biden's advisors acknowledged this weakness candidly. The memo noted that the first Trump administration's failure was "due in large part to failure to produce a factual record in support of termination, which is something that could be rectified." That concession is striking: Biden's own team recognized that Trump could, with better preparation, succeed in ending TPS protections the second time around. The response was not to let the democratic process play out. It was to stack the deck before leaving office.
Biden's administration had already resolved the prior litigation by either redesignating Haiti for TPS or rescinding the terminations outright. The memo reminded Biden that he had given TPS protections to Afghans, Cameroonians, Ethiopians, people from Burma, Lebanese, Ukrainians, and Venezuelan nationals, and had repeatedly extended protections for Haitians. Each designation added another layer of legal complexity for any successor who wanted to unwind them.
Eight Democratic senators pressed Biden's "senior team" for varying types of new TPS-related actions before Trump took office. The senators named in the memo included 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 specific actions they requested were not detailed in the portions of the memo disclosed so far.
Schmitt went further in his characterization, alleging that Biden's TPS plans would have protected members of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan criminal gang that has drawn national attention for its violent operations inside the United States. The memo excerpts disclosed so far do not directly reference the gang. Schmitt's claim stands as his own characterization of the practical consequences of blanket TPS expansion for Venezuelan nationals.
The memo also noted that "some stakeholders" were requesting Biden designate nationals from new countries, most notably Ecuador and Guatemala, for TPS before the transition. Those two countries alone accounted for a combined 2.1 million of the estimated new eligible population in the memo's chart. Biden has since left office, and his attention has turned to post-presidential pursuits, but the policy architecture his team tried to build remains a live issue in immigration courts and on Capitol Hill.
Schmitt noted on the Senate floor that the United States should not be a "get-rich-quick scheme for the third world" and drew an analogy to property rights, arguing that no American would voluntarily delay enforcement against squatters on their own property. The comparison was pointed: TPS, by design, is temporary. The Biden memo treated it as a permanent shield.
The memo's most expansive recommendations, covering the full 3.1 million, were never implemented. But Biden did act on a significant portion. One week after the memo was produced, he extended TPS protections for nearly 1 million noncitizens. Schmitt described that extension as "a concrete, mass-migration action" and the first step in what the memo envisioned as a far broader program.
Fox News Digital reached out to Biden and a former Biden official for comment. No response was reported. The Biden family has remained publicly active since leaving the White House, but neither the former president nor his representatives have addressed the memo's contents.
The Supreme Court has since ruled 6, 3 that the administration can terminate TPS for Haitian and Syrian migrants, a decision that removed one of the legal barriers the Biden memo anticipated exploiting. That ruling shifted the legal landscape significantly. The broader Biden political legacy now includes not just the border policies voters rejected in 2024 but the previously hidden effort to entrench those policies beyond the reach of the next president.
Schmitt summed up his findings bluntly:
"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."
He added: "Luckily, that never happened and we have been deporting Ecuadorians and Guatemalans."
Several open questions remain. The full text of the memo has not been publicly released. It is unclear whether the proposals were formally recommended or presented as options. The specific TPS-related actions requested by the eight Democratic senators have not been disclosed. And the current status of TPS for all affected nationalities under the Trump administration continues to evolve as court rulings and executive actions reshape the program.
When an outgoing administration spends its final days building legal obstacles for its successor, on a policy the voters just rejected, it is not governance. It is sabotage dressed in bureaucratic language, and the American public deserves to see every page of that memo.
