A GOP Senator Says a Departing Biden Team Tried to Trap Trump in Years of TPS Lawsuits. The Supreme Court Already Blew It Up.
Ten days before leaving office, then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a Biden appointee, signed an order extending Venezuela’s Temporary Protected Status designation by 18 months — covering roughly 600,000 people. Days later, the Federal Register published companion extensions for El Salvador, Sudan, and Ukraine. None of that is in dispute.
What is newly in dispute is why. On July 23, 2026, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) posted a six-part X thread with photos of what he described as an internal Biden administration memo — one he says recommended the TPS expansions specifically to trap an incoming Trump administration in years of litigation, covering as many as 3.1 million people. Twitchy, which broke Schmitt’s thread to a wider audience, noted the document “appears to be misdated.” No outlet has published the memo independently, and no individual author is named in it.
What is not in dispute is what happened next: Trump’s DHS moved to reverse the extensions within days of taking office, immigrant-rights groups sued, and 18 months of litigation ended June 25, 2026, when the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that TPS terminations are not subject to judicial review at all.
- 18 months — length of the Venezuela TPS extension Mayorkas signed 10 days before leaving office, covering roughly 600,000 people — Federal Register
- 3.1 million — people Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) says the internal document recommended shielding, including 2.1 million tied to proposed but never-enacted TPS designations for Ecuador and Guatemala — Schmitt's July 23, 2026 X thread, an attributed claim
- 6-3 — the Supreme Court's June 25, 2026 vote in Mullin v. Doe holding TPS terminations aren't subject to judicial review
- $2,600 — self-deportation stipend DHS now offers via the CBP Home app, up from $1,000 as of January 2026
On July 23, 2026, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, published a six-part thread on X with photographs of what he described as internal guidance from Biden’s “Senior Advisors,” drafted in the waning days of the administration. According to Schmitt, the document recommended DHS extend and expand TPS designations specifically to create legal and political obstacles for the incoming Trump administration — an assessment he attached to photos of the pages themselves, not a searchable or independently hosted copy of the memo.
Just The News covered Schmitt’s release the same day. Twitchy’s write-up, which first flagged the thread to a wider audience, described the underlying document as “misdated” — a detail Schmitt’s own thread does not fully resolve. No news organization has published the memo independently, and no individual author is named anywhere in the available material. This piece treats the memo’s existence and contents as Schmitt’s characterization of what he found, not as an established fact. That distinction matters here specifically because the memo is the newsiest part of the story and the least independently verifiable part of it — the opposite is true of everything that follows.
I'm releasing documents showing Biden's team drew up a plan in his final days to extend and expand TPS designations — a plan they knew would trap the incoming Trump administration in years of litigation over millions of people. Thread. (1/6)
Biden's 'Senior Advisors' recommended he create 2.1 million NEW TPS designees — even as we have been deporting Ecuadorians and Guatemalans. This wasn't policy. It was a trap. (thread)
Whatever the disputed memo did or didn’t recommend, the actions that followed it are a matter of public record. On January 10, 2025 — ten days before Biden left office — Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s DHS Secretary, signed an order extending Venezuela’s TPS designation by 18 months, covering roughly 600,000 people already in the United States. Six days later, on January 17, the Federal Register published a companion batch of extensions covering El Salvador (about 232,000 people), Sudan, and Ukraine. Each extension carried the standard TPS paper trail — a Federal Register notice citing the statutory country-conditions review — the same procedural record courts would spend the next year and a half scrutinizing.
Trump’s team acted almost immediately. On January 29, 2025 — nine days after inauguration — incoming DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced on Fox & Friends that she had rescinded the Venezuela extension: “Before he left town, Mayorkas signed an order that said for 18 months they were going to extend this protection to people that are in Temporary Protected Status… And we stopped that today.” DHS formally published the rescission on February 3, 2025.
The rescission triggered immediate legal challenge. Immigration and civil-rights groups filed National TPS Alliance v. Noem in the Northern District of California on February 19, 2025, arguing DHS’s rapid reversal skipped legally required review. Federal judges largely agreed. On September 5, 2025, Judge Edward Chen ruled the rescissions unlawful. Judge Ana Reyes separately found DHS had skipped a legally required review before terminating Haiti’s TPS designation, and in November 2025, Judge Katherine Polk Failla ruled for Syrian TPS holders on similar grounds.
DHS appealed, and in October 2025 the Supreme Court granted a shadow-docket stay in Noem v. National TPS Alliance, letting the Venezuela termination proceed while the underlying appeal continued — an early signal of where the eventual merits ruling was headed.
The case reached the Supreme Court’s merits docket recaptioned Mullin v. Doe, after Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), the current DHS Secretary, succeeded Noem in March 2026. Noem left the post to become U.S. Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas. On June 25, 2026, the Court ruled 6-3 that TPS termination decisions are not subject to judicial review under the Immigration and Nationality Act — a ruling that ended roughly 18 months of litigation over Haiti’s TPS status (about 350,000 people) and Syria’s (about 6,100 people). The same precedent was subsequently used to lift TPS protections for roughly 2,800 Yemeni nationals as well.
Mullin has defended the administration’s approach bluntly: “Temporary Protected Status was never intended to be permanent.” DHS has paired the terminations with an escalating self-deportation incentive, raising the CBP Home app stipend from $1,000 to $2,600 in January 2026.
The ruling drew sharp criticism from Democrats and some legal commentators, who argued it strips courts of any meaningful check on how TPS is wound down.
Today's ruling means courts can no longer review whether the administration followed the law when it strips protected status from hundreds of thousands of people who have built lives here. That's not how our system is supposed to work.
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.
Schmitt’s memo disclosure landed the same day he took another concrete action on TPS policy. On July 23, 2026, 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 TPS status the Supreme Court had just stripped of judicial review a month earlier. Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) criticized the block: “For generations, Massachusetts has been shaped by our immigrant communities. We have a moral duty to protect Haitian TPS holders… I am utterly disappointed that Republicans blocked passage of the bill.”
Schmitt did not connect the two actions publicly, and this piece does not allege that he did. But the sequence is itself a documented fact: the same senator who spent the day arguing Biden’s team had tried to lock in TPS protections also spent it blocking a bill that would have created a new one.
DHS Secretary — Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), confirmed March 2026, who has said TPS “was never intended to be permanent” and whose department’s termination decisions the Supreme Court has now shielded from judicial review.
His predecessor — Kristi Noem, who ordered the Venezuela rescission days into the administration and now serves as U.S. Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas.
Before them — Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s DHS Secretary, who signed the extensions this entire fight was over just ten days before leaving office.
Nothing here endorses or disputes Schmitt’s claim about the memo’s intent — this callout documents only who held the office, and when.
What’s independently documented: Mayorkas signed an 18-month Venezuela TPS extension — and companion extensions for El Salvador, Sudan, and Ukraine — ten days before leaving office; Noem rescinded the Venezuela extension within nine days of Trump’s inauguration; 18 months of litigation followed; and the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in June 2026 that TPS terminations aren’t subject to judicial review at all. What’s Schmitt’s characterization, not yet independently verified: that a specific internal memo recommended the extensions in order to trap Trump in litigation, and that the plan covered 3.1 million people, including proposed Ecuador and Guatemala designations that were never actually enacted. Twitchy itself flagged the underlying document as apparently misdated. Readers should treat the documented timeline as fact and the memo’s stated intent as an attributed political claim — a distinction this piece has tried to preserve throughout.
