Biden let Venezuelan gang members into the country and handed them work permits.
Now Congress is uncovering how he made sure they could never be deported.
Biden's backdoor amnesty scheme just got exposed – and it's worse than anyone thought.
How Biden Used Temporary Protected Status to Block Deportations for Over a Million Illegal Aliens
Representative BrandonGill chairs the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses.
And on he laid out precisely how the Biden administration hijacked Temporary Protected Status – TPS – to deliver what he calls "backdoor amnesty" to more than a million people with no legal right to be in the United States.
TPS was never designed for this.
Congress created the program to give temporary shelter to foreign nationals whose home countries had been hit by war or natural disaster – the operative word being temporary.
"It was intended to be temporary," Gill said during the hearing. "Yet the Biden Administration abused it and has utilized TPS as a form of backdoor amnesty for over a million people who entered our country illegally."
When Biden took office in January 2021, roughly 410,000 foreign nationals held TPS in the United States.
When he left office four years later, that number had more than doubled – surpassing one million.
Gill walked through the expansion country by country: Burma in 2021, Ukraine in 2022, Afghanistan in 2022, Cameroon in 2022, Ethiopia in 2022, Venezuela in 2021 and 2023, Haiti in 2024, Lebanon in 2024.
The TPS Work Permit Scheme That Made a Million Illegal Aliens Nearly Impossible to Deport
The most damning detail Gill put on the record is not the size of the expansion – it is how it was constructed.
Biden's team did not simply extend protections to illegal aliens already here when he took office.
They redesignated TPS countries on a rolling basis – shifting the cutoff date forward every 18 months to pull in new arrivals who had crossed the border during the Biden surge itself.
"About half of all current TPS beneficiaries weren't even residing in the United States until after Joe Biden took office," Gill told the committee. "In other words, TPS was a vehicle for providing backdoor amnesty for the very people that the American people saw pouring into our border for four years."
Expert testimony at the hearing put the mechanism in plain terms.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, testified that TPS and parole together formed what he called "the pillars of a shadow immigration system" – built to push work permits and Social Security numbers into the hands of illegal aliens and make them impossible to remove.
The work permit is the key.
Once an illegal alien has a Social Security number tied to years of employment, the legal and political machinery to remove them gets exponentially more complex.
Biden's team understood that.
The House Judiciary Committee documented the same blueprint in a March 2025 interim staff report titled De Facto Mass Amnesty, finding that roughly 725,000 of those who received TPS initially entered the country during the Biden border crisis – with the majority coming from Haiti and Venezuela.
95% percent of Venezuelan TPS holders and 91% of Haitian TPS holders entered the United States illegally.
Trump Moves to End TPS Amnesty as Democrats Sue to Protect Illegal Aliens
The Trump administration moved immediately to dismantle Biden's TPS architecture.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem revoked TPS for Venezuelans, Haitians, Afghans, and Cameroonians.
Open-borders activists sued in federal court.
A California judge blocked the revocations.
The Supreme Court stepped in last year in an 8-1 decision, lifting the lower court's block on Venezuelan TPS revocations and allowing the Trump administration to proceed while litigation continues.
"Pro-illegal alien activists are engaging in frivolous litigation against the Trump Administration to allow continued abuse of the U.S. immigration system," Gill said.
He is right about the stakes.
TPS is not a pathway to citizenship on its own – that was never the real goal.
The real goal was to run out the clock – to plant enough illegal aliens deep enough inside American employment and social systems that no future administration could touch them.
Biden almost succeeded.
Trump is undoing it in real time, and Congress is making sure the American people understand exactly what was done to them.
Sources:
- John Binder, "Rep. Brandon Gill Exposes Joe Biden's 'Backdoor Amnesty' to Keep over 1 Million Illegal Aliens in U.S.," Breitbart, June 9, 2026.
- "Hearing Wrap Up: Abuse of U.S. Immigration System Creates Financial Burdens on American Taxpayers," House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, June 9, 2026.
- "House task force to examine immigration policy abuses under Biden and Obama," The Washington Times, June 4, 2026.
- "New House Report Exposes How Controversial 'Amnesty' Program Exploded Under Biden," Fox News, March 3, 2025.
- "Report: De Facto Mass Amnesty: How the Biden-Harris Administration Abused Temporary Protected Status," House Judiciary Committee, March 4, 2025.