Joe Biden spent four years turning the southern border into an open door.
But a newly surfaced internal White House memo shows the outgoing administration was not done — not by a long shot.
And what Senator Eric Schmitt just pulled out of the archives will leave you stunned at how far Biden’s team was willing to go to sabotage Donald Trump before he ever took the oath.
The Memo Schmitt Pulled From the Archives
Schmitt said he obtained the memo from Archivist of the United States Edward Forst through his authority as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution.
The Biden White House memo from the administration’s final days revealed plans that could have expanded Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to more than 3 million noncitizens while acknowledging that previous court challenges had blocked many of President Donald Trump’s efforts to end the protections.
The memo outlined potential new TPS eligibility for 1.5 million Guatemalans, 600,000 Ecuadorians, 464,000 Nicaraguans, 455,000 Venezuelans, and smaller populations from Ukraine, Sudan, and Afghanistan, totaling over 3.1 million people, although the proposals were never fully implemented.
That last part — “never fully implemented” — is doing a lot of work. Because what actually happened in the week after that memo circulated tells a different story.
Schmitt noted that one week after the January 2025 memo — which he said was erroneously dated “2024” — Biden extended TPS protections for nearly 1 million noncitizens, meaning its transmission still led to “a concrete, mass-migration action.”
So the largest proposals may have stalled, but the memo still produced results. Biden’s people read it, and then Biden acted.
“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,” Schmitt said.
Think about that for a second. They recommended creating 2.1 million new TPS slots while openly admitting those applications would take half a year to process. They were not trying to help anyone. They were trying to flood the zone and hand Trump a six-month legal quagmire on day one.
Tren de Aragua and the Deportation Shield
“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,” Schmitt said, adding the move directly betrayed the “will of the people” who ousted liberal Democrats from power the prior election.
The memo predicted Republicans would argue that redesignating Venezuela amounted to amnesty for Tren de Aragua gang members, and while the document did not say gang members would automatically qualify, Schmitt argued the expansion risked shielding them from deportation.
In other words, Biden’s own advisers knew the Venezuela redesignation could cover gang members. They wrote it down. And they pushed forward anyway.
The memo argued that “granting TPS will potentially protect many vulnerable people from President-elect Trump’s planned mass deportations… They argue that these 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.”
That is not a humanitarian document. That is a legal warfare strategy written in the final weeks of a lame-duck presidency by people who knew the voters had fired them.
“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,” Schmitt said.
The memo reminded Biden he gave TPS protections to Afghans, Cameroonians, Ethiopians, people from Burma, Lebanese, Ukrainians and Venezuelan nationals and repeatedly extended protections for Haitians. The list reads less like a humanitarian record and more like a tally of every designation Biden could stack up before Trump’s people walked through the door.
What TPS Actually Does — and Why This Matters Now
TPS gives foreign nationals work permits and protection from deportation. A “redesignation” expands that shield to newly arrived migrants.
And once the shield goes up, taking it down is a legal nightmare — as Trump found out the first time around.
The memo noted that litigation had blocked Trump’s first-term TPS rollbacks, but conceded those cases prevailed largely because his administration had failed to build a sufficient factual record, a correctable mistake. Translation: Biden’s advisers studied Trump’s first-term losses in court, figured out why the government lost, and then tried to lock in as many new designations as possible before he could correct course.
That is not governance. That is sabotage dressed up in bureaucratic language.
But the Supreme Court recently delivered a significant blow to that strategy. The Supreme Court delivered a significant victory to President Trump’s immigration policies, ruling 6-3 that the administration can terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian migrants.
Writing for the majority, Justice Alito held that under the TPS law, the president has essentially unreviewable authority to end the program. That is a ruling Biden’s advisers never saw coming when they were drafting their litigation roadmap in January 2025.
The TPS program was created by Congress in 1990 for genuine humanitarian emergencies — wars, earthquakes, disasters that make it temporarily unsafe to return home. What Biden’s team was proposing was something else entirely: a permanent residency pipeline for millions of people from countries that had not experienced any new emergency, dressed up in the language of temporary relief.
Some of those Haitians, for example, have been under TPS protection for over 16 years. There is nothing temporary about it. The word “temporary” in the name stopped meaning anything a long time ago, and Biden’s advisers knew it. They were counting on it.
And the Democrat senators who pushed the White House to act before Trump took office were not exactly a fringe group. The memo said Democrat lawmakers requested additional TPS actions before President Trump took office. Those lawmakers included Senators Michael Bennet, Catherine Cortez Masto, Cory Booker, Richard Durbin, Mazie Hirono, Ben Ray Lujan, Tammy Duckworth, and Alex Padilla.
That is a who’s who of the Senate Left, all pushing to manufacture a legal obstacle course for an incoming president who had just won a clear mandate on immigration enforcement.
The broader picture here is not subtle. The Democrat Party spent four years flooding the country with illegal aliens, and when voters finally said enough and sent Trump back to Washington, the response from Biden’s inner circle was to find every legal mechanism available to make deportation as difficult as possible. Not because they believed in the policy. Because they believed it would hurt Trump politically and tie his hands legally.
And the fact that this memo existed at all — that senior advisers were sitting in the White House in January 2025 drawing up plans to shield Tren de Aragua members from deportation — says something about what the Democrat Party’s immigration agenda actually prioritizes. It is not about compassion. It is about building a permanent, unchallengeable population of people who would be dependent on Democrat protection to stay in the country.
Schmitt put it plainly on the Senate floor: the United States should not be a “get-rich-quick scheme for the third world.” He is right. And the memo he pulled from the archives proves that Biden’s team knew exactly what they were doing — and did it anyway.
The Supreme Court just handed Trump the legal authority to undo the damage that was done. The question now is whether Congress will make sure this kind of lame-duck immigration warfare can never happen again.
Sources: Fox News, The Gateway Pundit, RedState, Senator Eric Schmitt press releases and X posts, US Supreme Court opinion in Mullin v. Doe (June 25, 2026), YourNews, Truth Press