New House report exposes how controversial 'amnesty' program exploded under Biden

FIRST ON FOX: The number of immigrants protected from deportation by a controversial Clinton-era immigration program nearly quadrupled under the Biden administration, according to a new House report obtained by Fox News Digital.

The House Judiciary Committee report looks at the use of Temporary Protected Status under the previous administration. The program was implemented in the 1990s and grants protection from deportation and allows work permits for nationals living in the U.S. from countries deemed unsafe for them to be returned, due to armed conflict or natural disasters. 

The first Trump administration moved to limit the number of migrants protected by the program, but it then expanded massively under the Biden administration, with more than 1.4 million aliens from 16 different countries granted TPS as of January.

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Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas speaks Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024, during a briefing at the White House in Washington.  (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

The report found that the Biden-Harris administration added one million aliens in four years, after just 410,000 benefiting from TPS at the end of the first Trump administration, 

"What was intended by Congress to be a temporary status has become, over time, a permanent, automatically renewed designation, with some countries being designated for TPS for decades despite changed country conditions," the report says. "The Biden-Harris Administration vastly expanded this de facto amnesty to hundreds of thousands of new aliens, many of whom are in the country illegally."

The report found that roughly 725,000 of those with TPS initially entered during the Biden administration, with the majority from Haiti and Venezuela. 

There were no Venezuelan TPS beneficiaries during the BIden administration as it was not designated, with designations coming in 2021 and 2023. As of January 2025, there were 614,044 Venezuelan TPS beneficiaries -- nearly half of the total. The report also found that 95% of Venezuelans protected were not admitted with a visa, and so either entered illegally or via humanitarian parole. 

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Meanwhile, for Haiti, TPS beneficiaries jumped from 55,000 in Jan. 2021 to 342,260 in Jan. 2025, with 91% having entered without a visa.

The report does not solely criticize the Biden administration and says that prior administrations have "abused [TPS] for decades."

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has shutdown the use of TPS for hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries. ((Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) | (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images) | (Fox News Digital))

But it says with the expansion of TPS came a great deal of fraud "potentially in [the Biden administration's] rush to prevent the Trump Administration from being able to remove vast swaths of illegal aliens." It says it found multiple instances of aliens brought in claiming one nationality for parole and another for a grant of TPS, including 99 Afghans who later were granted TPS as nationals of Haiti.

Since the Trump administration took office, there have already been dramatic changes in policy on TPS. The administration last month vacacted a decision by the Biden administration to extend TPS for Haitians.

"President Trump and I are returning TPS to its original status: temporary," DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement.

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That move came after an earlier move that revoked the TPS status of more than 300,000 Venezuelan nationals. But the Judiciary Committee report says that more needs to be done, calling the moves by Noem a "critical first step" in restoring integrity to the program.

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"However, far more work is needed to root out fraud, end TPS designations that violate the statute and thus are no longer in the interest of the American people, and institute appropriate reforms to ensure such abuse can never again be inflicted on the country by a future open-borders Administration," it says, adding that Congress has a "critical role" to play in such reforms.