A newly uncovered Biden White House memo from January 2025 outlined plans to extend Temporary Protected Status to more than 3 million noncitizens, a move Sen. Eric Schmitt says was designed to shield illegal immigrants from deportation under President Trump.

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, produced during Biden's final days in office and described by Schmitt as "erroneously dated '2024,'" laid out a detailed strategy for expanding TPS, a program that grants temporary legal status to foreign nationals whose home countries are deemed unsafe, to millions of additional noncitizens, while candidly acknowledging that Trump had promised to revoke those protections.

One week after the memo was produced, Biden extended TPS for nearly 1 million noncitizens. The full scope of the memo's proposals, however, was never implemented. What it reveals is how far Biden's team was willing to go to lock in immigration protections before the new president took office, and how deliberately they planned to use litigation as a backstop against the incoming administration's enforcement agenda.

Memo urged Biden to create 2.1 million new TPS designees in his final weeks

The memo, addressed to Biden from unnamed "Senior Advisors," did not hold back about its purpose. It stated that "granting TPS will potentially protect many vulnerable people from President-elect Trump's planned mass deportations." Biden's advisors argued that the protections were "likely to hold in court" and that advocates were "prepared to litigate efforts to terminate or slow down the implementation of TPS for specified nations by the Trump Administration."

That language amounts to an open admission: the outgoing administration sought to create legal obstacles for the incoming one. The memo even acknowledged that Trump's first-term efforts to end TPS had been blocked largely because of procedural failures, not substantive law. It noted that "prior federal litigation brought by advocates during the first Trump administration was successful in halting efforts to terminate TPS, though that was due in large part to failure to produce a factual record in support of termination, which is something that could be rectified."

In other words, Biden's own advisors conceded that the legal protections they were counting on might not hold if the Trump administration built a stronger case the second time around.

Schmitt called the plan "mass amnesty-by-decree." He told Fox News Digital:

"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."

A chart inside the memo put the numbers in stark terms

The memo included a chart estimating the population of noncitizens who could become newly eligible for TPS under the proposed expansion. The figures were staggering: roughly 1.5 million Guatemalans, 600,000 Ecuadorians, 464,000 Nicaraguans, and 455,000 Venezuelans, along with smaller populations from Ukraine, Sudan, and Afghanistan.

The document also noted that Biden's "senior team" had received requests for new TPS-related actions from a roster of Democratic senators, including 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 referenced these requests but did not detail their specific contents.

Schmitt zeroed in on the scale of what was proposed, and the timeline that made it functionally impossible to execute honestly. TPS applications take roughly six months to process, a fact the memo itself acknowledged. Yet Biden's advisors recommended creating 2.1 million new TPS designees in the final weeks of his presidency. Schmitt framed that gap between process and proposal as a deliberate attempt to jam the incoming administration.

He said:

"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."

The memo also reminded Biden of the TPS protections his administration had already granted, to Afghans, Cameroonians, Ethiopians, people from Burma, Lebanese, Ukrainians, and Venezuelan nationals, and noted his repeated extensions for Haitians. It flagged that stakeholders were requesting new TPS designations for nationals from Ecuador and Guatemala specifically.

Biden's last-minute TPS extension covered nearly 937,600 migrants

While the full 3-million-person expansion never materialized, Biden did act on a significant portion of it. The New York Post reported that the Biden administration quietly extended TPS for nearly 937,600 migrants from Sudan, Ukraine, El Salvador, and Venezuela by 18 months, allowing them to remain in the United States into 2026. The announcement was made with little fanfare, just days before Trump's inauguration.

That extension alone complicated Trump's stated plans to wind down TPS. During his first term, Trump had moved to end TPS designations for nationals from Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti, El Salvador, Nepal, and Honduras. Courts issued preliminary injunctions blocking those terminations. Biden's memo acknowledged this history directly, noting that "the previous Administration unsuccessfully attempted to terminate TPS designations" for those countries and that Biden's own administration "took actions to resolve this litigation by either redesignating Haiti or rescinding the terminations."

Trump scrapped TPS during his first term for around 400,000 migrants before legal challenges stalled further action. His second-term administration has faced similar resistance. Pro-migrant advocates have filed lawsuits halting most of Trump's current efforts to end TPS for Haitians, Nepalese, Salvadorans, and Sudanese nationals. The pattern the Biden memo described, grant protections, then let litigation run the clock, has played out largely as the document anticipated.

The broader scope of Biden's TPS usage went well beyond the last-minute extension. AP News reported that the Biden administration granted TPS to immigrants from 17 countries, covering more than 1 million people total. Advocates had been pressing Biden to issue a new TPS designation for Nicaraguans before he left office, a request that aligned with the memo's chart showing 464,000 Nicaraguans as potential new designees.

Vice President JD Vance signaled the incoming administration's posture clearly during the 2024 campaign. "We're going to stop doing mass grants of Temporary Protected Status," Vance said at an Arizona rally. Trump himself stated during the campaign that he intended to revoke TPS protections for Haitians, a pledge the Biden memo explicitly anticipated.

Schmitt calls memo a blueprint for a "3.1-million-person deportation shield"

Schmitt did not limit his criticism to the memo's policy proposals. He characterized the document as evidence of a coordinated effort to obstruct immigration enforcement through executive action and deliberate litigation strategy.

"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."

The reference to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal gang, is Schmitt's characterization, not a claim drawn from the memo excerpts themselves. The memo's quoted language focuses on protecting "vulnerable people" from deportation, not on specific criminal organizations. But Schmitt's broader point, that a blanket TPS expansion would have covered dangerous individuals alongside legitimate asylum cases, reflects a longstanding conservative objection to the program's lack of individualized vetting.

In floor remarks shared as a video clip, Schmitt argued that the United States should not be a "get-rich-quick scheme for the third world" and compared the situation to a homeowner who would never voluntarily delay enforcement against squatters on their own property. The analogy was blunt, but it captured the frustration many conservative lawmakers feel about an immigration system that seems designed to resist enforcement at every turn.

Schmitt also noted that the proposals in the memo were never fully carried out, and that the Trump administration has since moved forward with deportations of Ecuadorians and Guatemalans, two of the populations the memo targeted for new TPS coverage.

"Luckily, that never happened and we have been deporting Ecuadorians and Guatemalans."

Fox News Digital sought comment from Biden; no response was reported

Fox News Digital reached out to Biden and a former Biden official for comment on the memo. Whether either responded was not reported. The silence is notable given the document's explicit acknowledgment that TPS expansion was intended to counteract the incoming president's enforcement agenda, a purpose the memo's own language makes difficult to characterize as routine policymaking.

The memo's candor about litigation strategy is particularly striking. Biden's advisors did not merely recommend expanding TPS on humanitarian grounds. They built their case around the expectation that courts would block Trump's efforts to reverse the protections, citing the first Trump administration's procedural failures as evidence that legal challenges would succeed again. That framing turns a humanitarian program into a tactical weapon, one designed less to protect people from danger abroad than to insulate a policy agenda from democratic reversal.

Several questions remain unanswered. The full text of the memo has not been released publicly. The identities of the "Senior Advisors" who authored it are unknown. And the specific requests made by the eight named Democratic senators, what exactly they asked Biden to do, and whether they coordinated with the White House on timing, remain undisclosed.

What is clear from the excerpts Schmitt obtained is that the Biden White House understood the political landscape it was operating in. Voters had just elected Trump on a platform that included mass deportations and the termination of TPS. The memo's authors knew this. They proceeded anyway, recommending an expansion so large it could not have been processed before Biden left office, built on a litigation strategy designed to tie the new administration's hands for years.

When an outgoing administration spends its final days building legal fortifications against the policies voters just chose, the word for that is not governance. It is obstruction with a government seal on it.