A newly obtained Biden White House memo from January 2025 laid out plans to expand Temporary Protected Status to more than 3 million noncitizens, a move Sen. Eric Schmitt says was designed to handcuff the incoming Trump administration.

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 using his authority as subcommittee chairman. The document, which Schmitt says was erroneously dated "2024," outlined options for a massive last-minute expansion of TPS, the federal program that lets foreign nationals from crisis-affected countries remain in the United States temporarily, and openly acknowledged that the goal was to block President Trump's enforcement agenda before it began.

The memo's own language is direct. It told Biden that "granting TPS will potentially protect many vulnerable people from President-elect Trump's planned mass deportations" and noted that advocates "are prepared to litigate efforts to terminate or slow down the implementation of TPS for specified nations by the Trump Administration." One week after the memo was produced, Biden extended TPS protections for nearly 1 million noncitizens.

Schmitt: Biden tried to build a '3.1-million-person deportation shield'

The scope of what the memo proposed goes well beyond the nearly 1 million who ultimately received extended protections. A chart embedded in the document 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.

Biden's senior advisors recommended creating 2.1 million new TPS designees in the administration's final weeks, even though, as Schmitt pointed out, the memo itself acknowledged that TPS applications take six months to process. The timeline made full implementation impossible before Inauguration Day, but the designations themselves would have created legal obstacles for the incoming administration to overcome.

Schmitt told Fox News Digital about the memo's contents on Friday and did not hold back:

"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."

He added:

"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 proposals in the memo were never fully implemented. But the document reveals the strategic thinking inside the Biden White House during its final days: use executive authority to lock in protections so broad and so legally entangled that the next president would spend years unwinding them.

Eight Democratic senators pushed Biden's team to act before Trump took office

The memo also shows that Biden's senior team fielded requests from eight Democratic senators urging new TPS-related actions before the transition. The senators named in the document are 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 those senators requested are not detailed in the memo excerpts obtained by Schmitt. But the document notes that "some stakeholders are requesting that your Administration designate nationals from new countries, most notably Ecuador and Guatemala, for TPS." That request alone, if granted, would have covered more than 2 million people based on the memo's own estimates.

The pattern of Biden administration resistance to transparency makes the memo's emergence all the more notable. Schmitt had to invoke his subcommittee authority to pry the document loose from the National Archives.

Biden's memo acknowledged Trump's first-term court losses, and how to exploit them

One of the most telling sections of the memo dealt with litigation history. The document reminded Biden that during Trump's first term, the administration "unsuccessfully attempted to terminate TPS designations for Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti, El Salvador, Nepal, and Honduras" and that "courts issued preliminary injunctions blocking the Trump Administration's actions."

The memo's authors conceded that those court losses were partly Trump's own fault, "due in large part to [its] failure to produce a factual record in support of termination, which is something that could be rectified." In other words, the Biden team knew the legal barrier was not insurmountable. But they also knew that stacking new TPS designations on top of existing ones would multiply the litigation the incoming administration would face.

Biden's record on TPS was already expansive. The memo noted that he had granted protections to nationals from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Burma, Lebanon, Ukraine, and Venezuela, and had repeatedly extended protections for Haitians. His administration resolved the Trump-era TPS lawsuits by either redesignating Haiti or rescinding the terminations outright.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump made clear he intended to revoke TPS protections for Haitians and would likely seek to rescind additional designations. The memo treated that campaign promise not as a policy disagreement to be debated but as a threat to be preempted through executive action and pre-positioned litigation.

Schmitt calls it a 'deportation shield' that would have protected gang members

Schmitt framed the memo's proposals in the sharpest terms available. He said 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 claim about the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is Schmitt's characterization; the memo excerpts released so far do not specifically reference the gang. But Venezuelan nationals were among those who would have received expanded protections under the plan.

The senator also highlighted the absurdity of the timeline. Biden's senior advisors recommended creating 2.1 million new TPS designees "in the last few weeks of his presidency, despite admitting TPS applications take 6 months," Schmitt said. The gap between what the administration proposed and what it could actually process before leaving office suggests the goal was not to complete the paperwork but to create legal facts on the ground.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration's immigration leadership has been working to reverse these protections. Trump has tried to end TPS for Haitians, Nepalese, Salvadorans, and Sudanese nationals, though lawsuits from pro-migrant advocates have halted most of those efforts so far.

Schmitt, however, pointed to one area where enforcement is proceeding. "Luckily, that never happened and we have been deporting Ecuadorians and Guatemalans," he said, a direct reference to the two nationalities the memo singled out for new TPS designations that Biden never granted.

In floor remarks, Schmitt argued that the United States should not be a "get-rich-quick scheme for the third world" and compared the situation to homeowners who would never voluntarily delay enforcement against squatters on their own property.

Fox News Digital reached out to Biden and a former Biden official for comment. No response was noted. The full contents of the memo beyond the excerpts Schmitt released remain undisclosed.

The broader legal landscape has shifted since the memo was written. The Supreme Court recently ruled 6, 3 that the administration can terminate TPS for Haitian and Syrian migrants, a decision that removes one of the legal obstacles the Biden memo's authors were counting on to protect their handiwork. That ruling hands the Trump administration a tool the Biden team's own document predicted it would lack.

Biden's record of controversial late-term decisions continues to draw scrutiny months after he left office. The TPS memo adds a new chapter, one that shows the outgoing White House was not merely defending existing policy but actively trying to manufacture an immigration crisis large enough to overwhelm its successor.

When an outgoing administration spends its final days building legal obstacles for the president the voters just chose, it is not governing. It is sabotage by paperwork.