Sen. Eric Schmitt has obtained an internal presidential memorandum from the Biden White House, written by senior advisors, that lays out a strategy to make Temporary Protected Status designations functionally irreversible. The memo didn't just recommend protecting illegal immigrants from deportation. It recommended structuring the protections so that any future president who tried to undo them would spend years in court.
They put the scheme in writing. On paper. In a memo.
"BREAKING: I am releasing a newly obtained internal Presidential memorandum from the Biden White House," Schmitt posted on July 23. "It details how Biden was advised to block President Trump's deportation of 3.1 MILLION noncitizens — including Tren de Aragua members."
That number is worth sitting with. Biden wanted to shield 3.1 million noncitizens using a legal framework specifically engineered to survive a change in administration. And among those 3.1 million, as Schmitt noted, were members of Tren de Aragua — the Venezuelan gang that has turned apartment complexes in Colorado cities into occupied territory.
The memo came from senior Biden White House advisors and recommended TPS extensions that included work permits and deportation protections structured to trigger automatic legal challenges if reversed. One week after the memo, nearly 1,000,000 noncitizens received TPS extensions. The timeline isn't subtle.
Schmitt framed the strategy in blunt terms: "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."
TPS was originally designed as a temporary humanitarian tool — short-term protection for people from countries hit by natural disasters or armed conflict. The operative word is "temporary." What the Biden memo reveals is an administration that took a narrow, time-limited program and deliberately weaponized it into a permanent immigration policy, one that would outlast the president who created it and handcuff the president who replaced him.
Open-borders advocates will frame this as compassionate governance — protecting vulnerable populations from a hostile administration. Which is an interesting way to describe a legal strategy that explicitly included members of a violent transnational gang in its protection umbrella. Compassion that covers Tren de Aragua isn't compassion. It's a policy choice with a body count.
The larger picture is one we've seen before. The Biden administration didn't just open the border during its four years. It spent its final months mining the exits. Executive orders designed to be legally sticky. Regulatory frameworks built to survive past January 20. TPS designations structured not for the people they covered but for the lawsuits they'd generate. This memo is the clearest proof yet that the chaos wasn't incompetence — it was architecture.
Schmitt closed with a promise: "I am going to keep fighting TPS until we get the job done."
A temporary program turned into a permanent shield, designed by people who knew they were leaving and wanted to make sure the mess they made couldn't be cleaned up. The memo doesn't reveal a difference in philosophy. It reveals a sabotage timeline.