A newly surfaced memo from the final days of the Biden administration is confirming what conservatives have said for years: that Joe Biden’s team was actively working to lock in mass migration policies on their way out the door, regardless of the consequences for the incoming Trump administration or the American people footing the bill.
The document, obtained by Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., shows that Biden’s senior team was weighing an expansion of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, that could have shielded more than 3.1 million noncitizens from deportation. Schmitt obtained the memo through his authority as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, pulling it directly from the Archivist of the United States, Edward Forst.
The memo was dated January 2025, though Schmitt noted it appears to have been mistakenly labeled 2024, placing it squarely in the final stretch of the Biden presidency, when officials knew Donald Trump was days away from retaking the Oval Office on a promise of mass deportations and a secure border.
According to the document, Biden advisers floated creating roughly 2.1 million new TPS designations in the administration’s closing weeks.
A chart included in the memo estimated that approximately 1.5 million Guatemalans alone could have become eligible under the proposal. Ecuador was also floated as a new country for designation, along with Guatemala, both nations whose nationals are now actively being deported under the Trump administration.
For those unfamiliar, TPS allows the federal government to shield foreign nationals already in the United States from deportation because of unsafe conditions in their home country. It was designed as a temporary humanitarian tool. In practice, it has become anything but temporary, with some designations lasting decades and expanding well beyond their original scope under Democrat administrations.
The memo makes clear that outside pressure was heavy on the Biden White House to keep expanding the program even as the president prepared to leave office.
It notes that senior officials received requests for new TPS-related actions from a long list of Senate Democrats, including 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.
Perhaps most telling, the memo itself acknowledges that a future Trump administration would likely try to terminate these protections, and it essentially offers Trump’s opponents a roadmap for how to stop him. The document states that past litigation against the first Trump administration succeeded in blocking TPS terminations largely because the government failed to build a sufficient legal record to justify ending the designations.
In other words, Biden’s team was not simply granting humanitarian protections. They were building a legal minefield designed to trap the incoming administration in years of court battles, specifically coaching future plaintiffs on how to beat Trump in court before he had even been sworn in.
While the full scope of the proposal outlined in the memo was never implemented before Biden left office, Schmitt pointed out that just one week after the memo circulated, Biden extended TPS protections for nearly 1 million noncitizens. That is not a footnote. That is a concrete, mass migration action taken in the final days of a lame duck presidency, timed specifically to box in the next administration.
The memo also serves as a reminder of just how far the Biden administration stretched TPS designations during its four years in office. It reportedly granted protections to nationals from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Burma, Lebanon, Ukraine, and Venezuela, on top of repeatedly extending protections for Haitian nationals that had already been in place for years.
Schmitt did not mince words about what the memo represents. In floor remarks this week, the Missouri Republican said the United States should not be treated as what he called a “get-rich-quick scheme for the third world,” arguing that Americans would never tolerate this level of leniency if the shoe were on the other foot, comparing it to how quickly a homeowner would act against squatters occupying their own property.
The timing of this revelation matters. It comes as the Trump administration has already dramatically reduced illegal crossings at the southern border, with daily encounters reportedly down as much as 94 percent since Trump returned to office. That improvement did not happen by accident. It happened because the current administration reversed the very policies that Biden’s team was scheming to entrench on its way out.
Conservatives have long argued that the Biden years represented not a series of accidental failures but a deliberate policy choice to loosen immigration enforcement, and this memo adds fresh documentary evidence to that argument. This was not chaos born of incompetence. This was a plan, drafted by senior officials, discussed with sympathetic senators, and executed with knowledge that it would complicate enforcement for whoever came next.
It is also worth noting how this memo came to light in the first place. It took a Republican-led Senate subcommittee, using its subpoena and oversight authority, to pry the document loose from the National Archives. Without that kind of aggressive oversight, this kind of internal Biden White House planning would likely have remained hidden from the public indefinitely.
Fox News reached out to both the Biden team and former Biden officials for comment on the memo’s contents. As of this writing, no substantive response addressing the memo’s specifics has been issued.
The revelations arrive at a politically sensitive moment, as Republicans in the House are separately pushing legislation intended to permanently lock in Trump-era border security policies, specifically to prevent a future Democrat administration from repeating exactly the kind of scheme outlined in this memo.
That effort, detailed elsewhere in today’s coverage, would tighten asylum standards, limit parole authority, and make it far harder for any future president to quietly reopen the floodgates the way Biden’s team appears to have planned.
Conservatives have pointed out that this memo undercuts years of claims from Democrats and members of the mainstream press that the border crisis under Biden was simply the result of external forces, economic pressures abroad, natural migration patterns, or bureaucratic dysfunction.
A memo showing senior staff actively planning to expand deportation protections for millions of people in the final days of the administration tells a very different story.
It is also a reminder of the scale of what the country is still working through. Even with a nearly 3.1 million person expansion never fully realized, the roughly 1 million people who did receive extended protections just one week after this memo was written represent a substantial and lasting policy legacy, one that current enforcement officials are still contending with as they work to restore order at the border and enforce existing immigration law.
