
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A newly uncovered memo from the final days of the Biden White House has revealed a plan that could have expanded Temporary Protected Status to more than 3 million noncitizens, and Republicans say it proves something far more troubling than mere neglect at the southern border. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">According to Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri, the document shows a deliberate, calculated strategy to trap incoming President Donald Trump in years of litigation while locking in protections for millions of people who entered the country illegally.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Schmitt, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, said he secured the memo directly from Archivist of the United States Edward Forst, using his subpoena and oversight authority as subcommittee chairman. The document itself was dated in the administration&#8217;s final days, though Schmitt noted it was erroneously marked &#8220;2024&#8221; despite circulating in January 2025, in the narrow window after the election but before Trump&#8217;s inauguration.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">&#8220;My investigation uncovered that the Lame Duck Biden White House tried to keep millions of illegal aliens in our country by abusing the &#8216;Temporary&#8217; Protected Status program,&#8221; Schmitt told Fox News Digital.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>What the Memo Proposed</strong></p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Temporary Protected Status was designed as a narrow, humanitarian tool, meant to shield foreign nationals from countries suffering war, natural disaster, or political collapse from deportation for a limited time. The memo obtained by Schmitt shows Biden&#8217;s senior advisors urging him to stretch that narrow tool far beyond its original purpose in the administration&#8217;s closing weeks.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A chart within the memo estimated potential new TPS eligibility for roughly 1.5 million Guatemalans, 600,000 Ecuadorians, 464,000 Nicaraguans, and 455,000 Venezuelans, along with smaller populations from Ukraine, Sudan, and Afghanistan. Schmitt says those figures add up to more than 3.1 million people who could have been shielded from deportation almost overnight.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Perhaps most striking, the memo reportedly shows Biden&#8217;s advisors recommending he create 2.1 million new TPS designees in the final weeks of his presidency, even while acknowledging that TPS applications normally take six months to process. Timeline detail matters: if the applications could not realistically be processed that quickly, the recommendation looks less like humanitarian policy and more like an attempt to jam as many people as possible into the pipeline before Trump could act.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Built to Survive a Change in Power</strong></p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">What separates this memo from routine immigration policy discussion, according to Schmitt, is its explicit acknowledgment that the goal was to outlast the incoming administration. The memo itself states that &#8220;granting TPS will potentially protect many vulnerable people from President-elect Trump&#8217;s planned mass deportations,&#8221; and adds that Biden&#8217;s team was &#8220;prepared to litigate efforts to terminate or slow down the implementation of TPS for specified nations by the Trump Administration.&#8221;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The memo even pointed to a roadmap for doing so, noting that earlier court challenges to Trump&#8217;s first-term TPS terminations succeeded largely because his administration &#8220;failed to produce a factual record in support of termination,&#8221; a flaw the memo suggested &#8220;could be rectified&#8221; to make future protections even harder to challenge.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">&#8220;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,&#8221; Schmitt said, referring to the violent Venezuelan gang that has drawn national attention. &#8220;The Biden Administration laughed off possibly unleashing a Venezuelan terrorist gang inside America as a partisan argument.&#8221;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>A Pattern, Not an Accident</strong></p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Schmitt and his allies argue that the memo undercuts a common defense of the Biden administration&#8217;s border record, that the surge in illegal immigration during those four years was the product of disorganization, overwhelmed agencies, or simple inattention. A memo explicitly designed to expand protections in the final weeks of a presidency, drafted with an eye toward surviving litigation from the next administration, suggests something more deliberate.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">&#8220;After the American people voted for President Trump&#8217;s promise to end the TPS scam, the Biden administration tried to subvert the will of the American people,&#8221; Schmitt said. &#8220;This was mass amnesty-by-decree. America is for Americans, and it is our home. It is not a permanent refugee camp.&#8221;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Schmitt also pointed to a related action that followed closely on the memo&#8217;s heels: one week after its transmission, Biden extended TPS protections for nearly 1 million noncitizens, a move Schmitt said proves the memo was not simply discarded but led to &#8220;a concrete, mass-migration action.&#8221;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Treason?</strong></p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Rather than a policy failure driven by circumstance, they say, the document shows officials at the highest levels of government actively engineering a system designed to be irreversible, expanding protections for millions of people specifically because the incoming administration would be powerless to stop it. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">To Schmitt and other critics, deliberately structuring government action to bind the hands of a lawfully elected successor is not politics as usual. It is a direct assault on the outcome of a national election and the sovereignty of the immigration system itself.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">No criminal charges have been filed over the memo, and the word &#8220;treason&#8221; carries a specific legal meaning under the Constitution that a memo alone would not typically satisfy. Still, in this author&#8217;s opinion, a plan built specifically to survive a change in power and bind the hands of a lawfully elected successor, drafted with knowledge that it could not be undone through normal democratic means, amounts to nothing less than treason against the will of the American voters who decided the 2024 election. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Critics and defenders will continue to disagree sharply over what the memo&#8217;s language reveals about the administration&#8217;s intentions, but the document itself leaves little doubt about what it was built to accomplish.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"></p>

Bombshell Memo: Biden Plotted to Flood Trump With Millions More Migrants
