Eric Schmitt Just Exposed a Biden Memo That Tried to Shield Tren de Aragua From Trump’s Deportations

The State Department labeled Tren de Aragua a terrorist organization for kidnapping, trafficking, and murder.

A newly leaked Biden memo shows senior advisers wanted to shield millions of noncitizens, including that same gang, before Trump took office.

One line inside that memo shows exactly how far Biden's team was willing to go to make it stick.

Senior Biden Advisers Pushed to Redesignate Five Countries in the Final Weeks

Sen. Eric Schmitt just released an internal Biden White House memo he obtained through his role on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution.

The memo is dated January 2, 2024, but references events from October 2024, a mismatch that points to a dating error in the document itself.

It doesn't matter when someone in the West Wing fumbled the date.

What matters is what's inside it.

Biden's senior advisers laid out requests from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, eight Senate Democrats, sympathetic mayors, and immigration advocacy groups to expand Temporary Protected Status before Trump could touch it.

The appendix reads like a wish list for open borders.

Four hundred fifty five thousand Venezuelans.

Four hundred sixty four thousand Nicaraguans.

Six hundred thousand Ecuadorians.

One and a half million Guatemalans.

Tens of thousands more from Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Sudan.

Schmitt didn't hide his disgust.

"Biden tried to turn TPS into a 3.1-million-person deportation shield."

Schmitt argues the Venezuela expansion would have shielded members of that same gang from deportation right along with everyone else.

The memo didn't promise gang members would be screened out.

It promised litigation if Trump tried to remove any of them.

The Timeline Was Designed So Trump Would Inherit the Mess

Here's the part that should make every one of Schmitt's colleagues furious.

The memo admits TPS applications take six months to process on average.

Biden's advisers wanted to open new eligibility anyway, just weeks before leaving office, fully aware Trump's Department of Homeland Security would be the one stuck processing the paperwork.

That's not humanitarian policy.

That's a booby trap.

The memo even coached Biden's team on how to win the coming court fights, noting Trump's first-term attempts to end TPS designations failed because his administration hadn't built a strong enough legal record.

In other words, Biden's people weren't just trying to protect migrants.

They were trying to out-lawyer the next administration before it even walked in the door.

The largest pieces of the plan never came together.

Ecuador and Guatemala never got the new designations Biden's advisers pushed for.

He still acted on part of it, extending status for close to a million people from Venezuela, El Salvador, and Ukraine within a week of reading the memo.

The TPS Playbook Democrats Have Run for Three Decades

None of this should surprise anyone who has watched how TPS actually works.

Congress created the program in 1990 as a short-term bridge for people fleeing genuine disasters.

Somalia got its first TPS designation in 1991 and has been renewed or redesignated 27 times since, according to the Congressional Research Service.

El Salvador's nationals have held "temporary" status for 26 years.

Schmitt summed up the racket in five lines on the Senate floor.

"Democrats built a one-way ratchet for mass immigration."

Declare an emergency, grant the status, wait out the emergency, extend anyway, repeat until temporary becomes permanent.

Democrats have run that play for three decades and Biden's final memo shows they intended to run it again on their way out the door.

The Supreme Court finally slowed the ratchet down in June, ruling 6 to 3 that most TPS termination decisions can't be second-guessed by federal judges.

That ruling stripped away the exact legal weapon Biden's advisers were counting on.

This Was Sabotage Dressed Up as Compassion

Democrats didn't lose the border because voters got confused about compassion.

They lost it because voters watched a defeated president's staff spend his last weeks in office engineering legal landmines for the guy they just fired.

This memo isn't a policy disagreement.

It's a blueprint for sabotage, timed to detonate after the movers had already left the White House.

Tren de Aragua didn't need a redesignation to become dangerous.

They needed Biden's own government to keep looking the other way, and for one more month, that's exactly what senior staff pushed him to do.

Trump's DOJ and DHS now have the SCOTUS ruling in hand and a paper trail straight from Biden's own advisers.

That combination is going to make the next TPS fight a lot shorter than Democrats planned for.

Sources:

• Ben Smith, "Bombshell Biden Memo Reveals Push to Shield 3.1 Million Noncitizens From Trump Deportations," RedState, July 24, 2026.
• Fox News Digital, "Biden memo reveals TPS plan to shield 3 million from deportations," Fox News, July 24, 2026.
• Smoosieq, "SCOTUS Hands Trump Major Immigration Win," RedState, June 25, 2026.
• National Counterterrorism Center, "Tren de Aragua," Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
• Congressional Research Service, "Temporary Protected Status and Deferred Enforced Departure," Congress.gov.