I have spent three decades pricing risk for a living. Before I sign off on any credit strategy, I ask one question: what happens when the other side stops cooperating? A memo Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) released this week shows the outgoing Biden White House asking the same question about the American voter, then building a plan around that answer.

The document, dated the final weeks of Biden's presidency, laid out a strategy to expand Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to cover more than 3.1 million people from Guatemala, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and other countries just before President Trump took office. Its authors put the breakdown in writing, according to Fox News: 1.5 million Guatemalans, 600,000 Ecuadorians, 464,000 Nicaraguans, 455,000 Venezuelans, plus smaller cohorts from Ukraine, Sudan, and Afghanistan. Schmitt called it what it is, mass amnesty by decree, a scheme built to survive an election its authors knew they had lost.

TPS itself is not the villain here. Congress created it in 1990 to give people fleeing war zones and natural disasters a temporary lifeline, not a permanent visa program, and USCIS's own program guidance still describes it that way. The word “temporary” sits right in the name. But the memo treats that word as decorative. Its authors knew a designation, once made, is almost impossible to unwind. They cited the litigation record directly: courts blocked Trump's first-term attempts to end TPS for Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti, El Salvador, Nepal, and Honduras because the Department of Homeland Security had not built a sturdy enough........

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