Bombshell Memo Reveals Biden Planned to Leave Trump Major Immigration Crisis
A newly uncovered internal White House memo reveals that Biden administration officials considered expanding Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to over 3.1 million noncitizens in the final weeks before President Donald Trump took office, according to documents released by Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) on July 23, 2026. While the most expansive proposals were never enacted, the memo has reignited debate over the transition of immigration policy between administrations.
The Memo’s Contents
Schmitt, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, obtained the memo from the Archivist of the United States and published photographs of the document in a six-part thread on X. According to Fox News, which first reported the story, the memo recommended expanding TPS to multiple countries, estimating potential new eligibility for roughly 3.1 million people, including approximately 1.5 million Guatemalans, 600,000 Ecuadorians, 464,000 Nicaraguans, and 455,000 Venezuelans, plus smaller populations from Ukraine, Sudan, and Afghanistan.
The document acknowledged that granting TPS “will potentially protect many vulnerable people from President-elect Trump’s planned mass deportations” and noted that prior litigation “was successful in halting [Trump’s] efforts to terminate TPS.” Schmitt described the memo as evidence that the Biden administration “tried to subvert the will of the American people.”
“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,” Schmitt told Fox News Digital. “This was mass amnesty-by-decree.”
What Actually Happened
While the memo proposed sweeping expansions, the actual actions taken by the Biden administration were more limited. As CBS News reported, on January 10, 2025 — ten days before leaving office — then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas signed an order extending Venezuela’s TPS designation by 18 months, covering roughly 600,000 people. On January 17, the Federal Register published companion extensions for El Salvador (~234,000), Sudan (~1,900), and Ukraine (~104,000).
Notably, the Biden administration declined to add new countries like Nicaragua or Guatemala, despite pressure from progressive activists. Officials were “leaning against it” due to “concerns about the move appearing like a politically motivated effort to hinder the incoming administration,” CBS News reported. The total scope of actual action covered approximately 1 million people with existing TPS renewals, not 3.1 million new designees.
Independent Verification and Caveats
The memo has not been independently published by any news organization, and its contents are known only through Schmitt’s characterization and photographs. Civic Intelligence, which provided independent analysis, noted that Twitchy — which first covered Schmitt’s thread — described the document as “misdated.” No individual author is named in the available material, and no response from former Biden officials has been published.
Trump Administration Response and Litigation
The Trump administration moved swiftly to reverse the extensions. On January 29, 2025 — nine days after inauguration — incoming DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced on Fox & Friends that she had rescinded the Venezuela TPS extension. DHS formally published the rescission on February 3, 2025.
Immigration and civil-rights groups challenged the rescission, filing National TPS Alliance v. Noem in February 2025. Multiple lower courts found the rescissions unlawful, citing skipped procedural review. However, the legal landscape shifted dramatically on June 25, 2026, when the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Mullin v. Doe that TPS termination decisions are not subject to judicial review under the Immigration and Nationality Act.
According to Wikipedia, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority that the statute “bars judicial review of any determination… with respect to the… termination” of a TPS designation, and that “this text is clear, and its plain meaning is very broad.” The ruling affected roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing in dissent, argued that the evidence of racial animus included “statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.” She warned that “hundreds of thousands of lives will be uprooted, most permanently.”
Analysis and Implications
The story illustrates the deeply partisan nature of immigration policy debates. The memo’s proposals for Guatemala and Ecuador were never implemented, and the actual TPS extensions that did occur were subsequently reversed by the Trump administration and upheld by the Supreme Court. The Court’s June 2026 ruling now gives the executive branch broad discretion to terminate TPS without judicial review.
Schmitt’s memo disclosure landed the same day he blocked a Senate unanimous-consent request on H.R. 1689, a Democratic bill that would have designated Haiti for TPS — the same country whose protections the Supreme Court had just stripped of judicial review.
What’s Next
Key questions remain unanswered. Will the full memo be released for independent verification? Did the memo actually influence Biden’s January 2025 TPS decisions, or was it merely one of many options considered? And how will the Mullin v. Doe ruling affect the remaining approximately 1.3 million TPS holders from 17 countries currently enrolled in the program?
As the legal commentator Jonathan Turley noted, “The Court’s holding is narrower than critics suggest — it says TPS termination is committed to agency discretion, not that agencies are free to ignore their own procedural rules. Expect continued litigation over the process, just not the underlying policy choice.”