Trump Administration Highlights: Judge Orders Halt on Deportations of Venezuelans Under Wartime Law (2025)

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The president ordered deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used 1798 law.

But shortly after the announcement, James E. Boasberg, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., said he would issue a temporary order blocking the government from deporting any immigrants under the law.

In a hastily scheduled hearing, he said he did not believe the law offered grounds for the president’s action, and he ordered any flights that had departed with Venezuelan immigrants under the executive order to return to the United States “however that’s accomplished — whether turning around the plane or not.”

“This is something you need to make sure is complied with immediately,” he directed the government.

Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued over the executive order, said in an interview after the hearing that he believed two flights were “in the air” on Saturday evening.

During the hearing, Judge Boasberg said he was ordering the government to turn flights around given “information, unrebutted by the government, that flights are actively departing.”

A lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, told the judge that he did not have many details to share and that describing operational details would raise “national security issues.”

After the hearing, the government filed an appeal. In a statement late Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the judge had put “terrorists over the safety of Americans” and placed “the public and law enforcement at risk.”

“The Department of Justice is undeterred in its efforts to work with the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and all of our partners to stop this invasion and Make America Safe Again,” she added.

The president’s order, dated Friday, declared that Venezuelans who are at least 14 years old, in the United States without authorization and part of the Tren de Aragua gang are “liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed.”

The Alien Enemies Act allows for summary deportations of people from countries at war with the United States. The law, best known for its role in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, has been invoked three times in U.S. history — during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II — according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy organization.

Hours before the White House published its proclamation, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of five Venezuelan men seeking to block the president from invoking the law. All five men were accused of having links to Tren de Aragua but deny that they are in the gang, Mr. Gelernt said. One of the men was arrested, the lawsuit said, because an immigration officer “erroneously” believed he was a member of Tren de Aragua because of his tattoos.

Judge Boasberg initially issued a limited order on Saturday blocking the government from deporting the five men.

The Trump administration promptly filed an appeal of the order, and the A.C.L.U. asked the judge to broaden his order to apply to all immigrants at risk of deportation under the Alien Enemies Act. At the hearing Saturday evening, Judge Boasberg said he would issue a broader order applying to all “noncitizens in U.S. custody.”

In the lawsuit, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union wrote that the Venezuelans believed that they faced an immediate risk of deportation. “The government’s proclamation would allow agents to immediately put noncitizens on planes,” the lawsuit said, adding that the law “plainly only applies to warlike actions” and “cannot be used here against nationals of a country — Venezuela — with whom the United States is not at war.”

The judge agreed, saying that he believed the terms “invasion” and “predatory incursion” in the law “really relate to hostile acts perpetrated by enemy nations.”

The White House and the Homeland Security Department, which runs the nation’s immigration system and was named in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Noah Feldman, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, said the fate of the case, which could ultimately wind up at the Supreme Court, would hinge on “how much deference the courts pay to the president’s determination that there’s a threatened incursion.” Judges would have to make that determination “without a lot of precedent,” Professor Feldman added.

President Trump, who campaigned last year on a promise to initiate the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, has often referred to the arrivals of unauthorized immigrants as an “invasion.” One of the first executive orders he issued after returning to the White House was titled, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.”

His proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act appeared to be narrowly focused on Tren de Aragua, a gang that emerged from a Venezuelan prison and grew into a criminal organization focused on sex trafficking, drug dealing and human smuggling.

But if the Trump administration’s interpretation of the law is ultimately upheld, it could empower the administration to remove other immigrants age 14 or older without a court hearing. That would enable the extraordinary move of arresting, detaining and deporting immigrant minors without the due process afforded to immigrants for decades.

Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, a legal group that joined the A.C.L.U. in submitting the challenge to the executive order, said in a statement that Saturday was a “horrific day in the history of the nation, when the president publicized that he was seeking to invoke extraordinary wartime powers in the absence of a war or invasion.”

Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.

The judge said that “these are hard questions” but that he did not believe the law offered grounds for the president’s order. He said that the terms “invasion” and “predatory incursion” in the law “really relate to hostile acts perpetrated by enemy nations.”

He said that any flights that had departed with people under the order needed to return to the United States “however that’s accomplished — whether turning around the plane or not.” He urged the government: “This is something you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”

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Adam Boehler, Trump’s pick to run hostage negotiations, was withdrawn from consideration.

Ms. Leavitt added that Mr. Boehler had played a “critical role” in the February release of Marc Fogel, a teacher who was arrested on charges of bringing medical marijuana into Russia in August 2021.

Mr. Boehler, a health care entrepreneur and close ally of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, has had a roving presence in the White House during both of Mr. Trump’s terms. In 2020, he worked on the federal government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, helping coordinate emergency response efforts and the Trump administration’s coronavirus vaccine development initiative, Operation Warp Speed.

Dustin Stewart, who served in the Biden administration as the deputy special envoy for hostage affairs and has worked closely with Mr. Boehler in recent months, was expected to continue serving as the acting special envoy until the Trump administration decides who should hold the job permanently, a senior administration official said.

Mr. Boehler asked to be withdrawn from consideration for the job, according to two senior administration officials, in part because he did not want to divest from his health care investment firm, which would have been required for the Senate-confirmed position. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.

A special government employee is an executive branch appointee named to “perform important, but limited, services to the government, with or without compensation, for a period not to exceed 130 days” during a one-year period. Elon Musk, who is leading the cost-cutting initiative known as the Department of Government Efficiency, is also a special government employee.

Mr. Boehler is expected to still have broad latitude to work on hostage negotiations from his State Department office, one official said.

Mr. Rubio asked Mr. Boehler this month to meet with senior Hamas leaders in Qatar, an attempt to jump-start cease-fire talks and secure the release of Edan Alexander, the last remaining Israeli American captive believed to be alive, and the bodies of four others. The talks did not produce an agreement, and Mr. Rubio referred to them as a “one-off.”

The talks broke with the United States’ practice of refusing to negotiate directly with Hamas, which the State Department has designated as a terrorist group. And they upset Israeli officials, who were surprised by the visit. Ron Dermer, a close adviser to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, confronted Mr. Boehler in a phone call over the Hamas talks, according to a senior administration official.

Mr. Boehler was also heavily involved in the release this week of American prisoners held in Kuwait on drug charges.

Trump seeks more sway in picking Kennedy Center honorees.

Mr. Trump, who is now the chairman of the Kennedy Center, is scheduled to speak at a meeting of its board on Monday afternoon, when proposed changes to the honors advisory committee will be on the agenda, according to the individuals and a copy of the agenda that was obtained by The New York Times.

Since 1978, the Kennedy Center has named honorees to be recognized each year at a star-studded televised gala without interference from the White House. The center has honored a broad spectrum of artists and performers, including Lucille Ball, Dolly Parton, Clint Eastwood, Fred Astaire and the Grateful Dead.

But Mr. Trump is seeking a more direct role. He replaced all the Biden appointees on the center’s once-bipartisan board, was elected chairman and installed a loyalist, Richard Grenell, as its president. The board is scheduled to meet Monday to consider a resolution, which has not been previously reported, that would give Mr. Trump more control over the selection of honorees.

The resolution states that members of the committee responsible for selecting honorees “shall be appointed by the chairman of the board, and shall serve at the pleasure of the chairman,” according to a copy obtained by The Times. That would give Mr. Trump broad power to hire and fire those who help decide who will receive the honor, which recognizes people and institutions for lifetime artistic achievement. The committee will recommend a slate of honorees to the Kennedy Center’s president for approval, the resolution says.

In the past, Kennedy Center officials chose the members of the committee responsible for proposing honorees after receiving recommendations from former honorees, the board, the arts community and the general public. Last year, the committee was chaired by the philanthropist David C. Bohnett and included board members, Kennedy Center officials and artists, including Gloria Estefan, Sally Field, Renée Fleming, Herbie Hancock, Judith Jamison, Lionel Richie and John Williams.

It is not clear what Mr. Trump has in mind for the committee, or what kind of artists he would like to see honored at the Kennedy Center. Since the start of his second term, he has turned to stars like Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight to serve as envoys to Hollywood.

The Kennedy Center declined to discuss the upcoming board meeting or the resolution to change the honors process.

Mr. Grenell said in a statement that “the financial situation at the Kennedy Center is a serious problem that has been hidden from the public for too long, and so Donald Trump is committed to putting the Kennedy Center on a solid financial foundation by having programming that appeals to everyone, not just a few.”

Officials at the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday afternoon.

Mr. Trump has a stormy history with the Kennedy Center Honors, the institution’s most important fund-raiser of the year, which is televised on CBS and includes a White House reception ahead of the awards. Several of the artists who were honored in 2017, early in the first Trump administration, criticized Mr. Trump and suggested that they would boycott the White House reception. After that Mr. Trump broke with tradition and stayed away from the honors galas for his entire term.

At the start of his second term, Mr. Trump set his sights once again on the Kennedy Center. He ousted the center’s longtime chairman, the financier David M. Rubenstein, the center’s largest donor, and fired Deborah F. Rutter, the center’s president for more than a decade.

Mr. Trump’s push to expand his influence over the Honors program is part of a broader campaign to reshape the Kennedy Center’s cultural identity. Promising a “Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” Mr. Trump has vowed to rid the center of “woke” influences, drag shows and “anti-American propaganda.” He has appointed close allies to the board, including his chief of staff, Susie Wiles; Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host; and Dan Scavino, a longtime aide.

While Mr. Trump’s plans for the center are still taking shape, Mr. Grenell, a former ambassador to Germany who is serving as the center’s interim president, has said the center intends to host a “a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas.”

Mr. Trump’s actions have prompted an outcry from artists and patrons of the Kennedy Center. Several prominent figures, including the actress Issa Rae and the musician Rhiannon Giddens, have canceled engagements at the center in protest. The musical “Hamilton” recently scrapped a planned tour there next year.

Vice President JD Vance and the second lady, Usha Vance, whom Mr. Trump also appointed to the board, were loudly booed while attending a concert on Thursday by the National Symphony Orchestra, one of the center’s flagship ensembles.

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Judge James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia granted a request for a temporary restraining order, prohibiting the Trump administration from removing any of the Venezuelans from the country until a hearing on the case can be held. Trump administration lawyers swiftly appealed the order.

Rejected by Washington, federal workers find open arms in state governments.

Hawaii is fast-tracking job applications. Virginia started a website advertising its job market. Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania signed an executive order aimed at attracting federal employees to the state’s 5,600 “critical vacancies” in the state government. Both New Mexico and Maryland announced expanded resources and agencies to help federal workers shift into new careers in the state, and Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York is encouraging people to “come work in the greatest state in the nation.”

There has been interest. The New York governor’s office said roughly 150 people have signed up to attend information sessions hosted by the state’s Department of Labor.

But it’s too soon to say how many federal employees are applying for state-level roles and how exactly demographics could shift as a result, according to William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

There were about 2.3 million civilians employed by the federal government’s executive branch when President Trump was sworn into office on Jan. 20. Thousands of government jobs have been cut as part of DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts across a range of agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.

Some of those fired employees have since been rehired, and courts have temporarily stopped some of the administration’s efforts. Many federal employees, including those who have highly specific government skills, are suspended in the unknown and looking for new roles pre-emptively.

State governments have begun competing to attract those federal employees to unfilled state roles. The effort also has political overtones, with states run by Democrats leading the charge.

“If the Trump administration turned you away, Minnesota wants you,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said.

Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate during last year’s election, announced efforts to help federal employees find jobs in Minnesota on March 6, the day after the Trump administration said it planned to cut over 80,000 employees from Veterans Affairs.

Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York launched an ad campaign targeted at federal employees last week. “We won’t denigrate you. We will treat you with dignity and respect that you deserve because, in New York, we know it’s not the demagogues and the technocrats who make America great, it’s public servants,” she said in a statement.

On Feb. 18, Gov. Josh Green of Hawaii signed an executive order designed to attract federal workers and fast-track the state’s hiring process.

“We’ve already had 1,239 applications for technology jobs, investigator positions and corrections officers, to name a few categories,” Mr. Green said in an email. “We’ve needed a lot of these positions to be filled.”

Maryland, which has the second-highest concentration of federal employees outside of Washington, set up a variety of initiatives for former federal workers, including a way to help those interested in starting a second career with Maryland’s public schools. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, in announcing the state’s efforts, called the federal government cuts an “illegal purge.”

“This is not about efficiency. This is about rigging the government for the already rich and powerful, like Elon Musk,” he said in a statement.

While states are using this as an opportunity to oppose Mr. Trump, workers are unlikely to follow that lead, Dr. Frey said.

“People move because of jobs,” he said. “They don’t move for politics.”

As more states and cities are introducing initiatives to support former federal workers, many public servants are hoping to be able to stay put.

Colin Murphy, a former product manager at 18F, a previous unit at the General Services Administration, was thrilled to see his city of Cleveland, Ohio, announce a Rapid Response Hub for federal employees.

“I would love to see my experience and my knowledge I’ve gathered at the federal level be transferred to any state that is willing to take me,” Mr. Murphy said, adding, “Ultimately, I got in this role to serve the people, and I would do anything to serve the people that I live with.”

Not every state is courting federal workers because of politics. Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Republican of Virginia, debuted a new initiative and website last month titled, “Virginia Has Jobs.” Choosing his words carefully, he expressed support for the efforts of DOGE, calling the federal government inefficient and saying change “needs to happen.”

“We have a lot of federal workers in the commonwealth,” he continued, “And I want to make sure they know we care about them and we value them and we want them to find that next chapter should they experience job dislocation here in Virginia.”

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Kash Patel pushes command changes at the F.B.I.

Instead, those field offices will report to three branch directors at headquarters who will be in charge of the East, West and Central regions. The remaining three F.B.I. offices and the largest in the country — New York, Washington and Los Angeles — will answer to the deputy director.

“These changes are meant to empower our S.A.C.s through improved engagement and leadership connections,” said the email, which was sent on Friday, referring to special agents in charge, who typically oversee field offices in a given region.

It represents a shift after a quarter-century of an F.B.I. run under a structure put in place by Robert S. Mueller III after the Sept. 11 attacks. The model was established to address administrative lapses and bolster efforts to deter terrorism. In Mr. Patel’s iteration, he has appointed a total of five branch directors, eliminating the executive assistant directors who previously managed the F.B.I. on a daily basis.

The announced changes were not unexpected, as Mr. Patel has already moved to reduce the number of F.B.I. employees working at headquarters and push them into the field, making good on a pledge he made before becoming director. His efforts have drawn praise from President Trump.

The swift decision to alter the hierarchy of the F.B.I. comes just weeks after Mr. Patel was confirmed, raising questions among former and current agents about the thoroughness of the plan. In particular, they said, they worried that the changes could result in less coordination between field offices and create intelligence gaps. Still, even former senior executives skeptical of Mr. Patel’s leadership and relative lack of experience believe the new model, while imperfect, could be an improvement and certainly reduce the deputy director’s immense responsibilities.

In theory, the move could help the new deputy director, Dan Bongino, who has never worked for the F.B.I. and has a limited understanding of its complex and global operations, transition into an important role that has traditionally been filled by a senior agent. The changes could free him up more to handle domestic and international investigative and intelligence activities, among other things. The previous deputy director had dozens of direct reports, including all the top agents in the field.

How Mr. Patel came up with his plan so quickly is not exactly clear, but he has been relying on a newly established group of former agents, known as the director advisory team, for guidance. But those agents are long retired and only one had reached the senior ranks.

One former F.B.I. official familiar with the advisory team’s work said that members had been considering a regional model, but it differed from the one that was announced. A former senior agent on the advisory team who had worked with F.B.I. leadership before Mr. Patel arrived had even written a white paper that included a similar model.

The former official said that Mr. Patel’s plan was better than previous proposals, but that its success hinged on having strong leaders in those roles.

Changes to the top ranks of the F.B.I.’s structure had been discussed long before Mr. Patel’s arrival, former senior F.B.I. officials said, along with reducing the number of employees located in the Capitol region. One former executive who left several years ago but was deeply involved in the bureau’s management applauded Mr. Patel’s effort.

As part of his plan, Mr. Patel named five acting branch directors to essentially run the F.B.I. after the former executives in charge of those areas were abruptly pushed out.

Among the new acting branch directors is Michael Glasheen, who ran counterterrorism at the Washington field office when he took the job in August 2021, after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 of that year. Mr. Glasheen will be in charge of “field services,” but what responsibilities fall under his purview were not exactly clear. Previously, the bureau had executive assistant directors for science and technology and intelligence. Former F.B.I. officials said Mr. Patel decided to put intelligence under the operational control of the national security branch.

Mr. Patel has said: “The biggest problem the F.B.I. has had has come out of its intel shops. I’d break that component out of it.”

Also promoted was Steven Jensen, who was tapped to oversee the bureau’s national security programs. Mr. Jensen most recently ran the F.B.I.’s field office in Columbia, S.C. Former agents said the selection of Mr. Jensen stood out because he ran a major section at the bureau that helps manage the threat of domestic terrorism. In that role, he helped coordinate the F.B.I.’s nationwide investigative efforts in connection with the Jan. 6 attack.

President Trump and his allies, including Mr. Patel, have attacked the bureau for arresting those involved in the Jan. 6 riot. It was not known if Mr. Patel had questioned the men about their views on the F.B.I.’s response to Jan. 6.

In a speech at the Justice Department on Friday, Mr. Trump said he had “pardoned hundreds of political prisoners who had been grossly mistreated. We removed the senior F.B.I. officials who misdirected resources to send SWAT teams after grandmothers and J6 hostages.”

Now the president’s director, Mr. Patel, is promoting the men Mr. Trump has falsely accused of wrongdoing.

The Jan. 6 investigation was the largest in the bureau’s history, with more than 5,000 F.B.I. employees taking part in about 2,400 investigations. Before Mr. Patel arrived, the agency’s acting leaders clashed with the Justice Department, which had demanded the names of bureau personnel who worked on the investigations.

The demand elicited fears at the time that the administration would conduct a purge or make their names public, possibly putting their lives at risk. So far, the Justice Department has not done so.

Critics of the agency have said that if the bureau had taken a more aggressive stance in the run-up to Jan. 6, the rioting at the Capitol might have been prevented. But the bureau lacked imagination and failed to connect to the dots, ultimately missing a chance to thwart the domestic terrorism attack that further polarized the country.

Trump signed the spending bill, avoiding a government shutdown.

That sent the measure to the Senate, which spent the rest of the week deliberating whether to accept the Republican bill from the House, or send it back and shut down the government at 12:01 a.m. Saturday.

The key vote came on Friday afternoon, after days of Democratic agonizing that divided the party. That procedural vote, which ended debate and moved the bill to a final vote, needed the support of some Democrats. Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, and nine other members of his caucus supplied the votes needed to effectively thwart a filibuster by their own party and prevent a shutdown.

The final vote to pass the spending measure and send it to Mr. Trump to sign was 54 to 46, nearly along party lines.

Carl Hulse and Catie Edmondson contributed reporting from Washington.

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President Trump announced the monument rescission on Friday in an executive order, saying the monuments “lock up vast amounts of land from economic development and energy production.” Both the Chuckwalla and Sáttítla monuments were created at the request of California lawmakers and numerous tribal organizations.

The U.S. Institute of Peace is an independent organization created by Congress in 1985 that works to end conflict with diplomacy. President Trump last month issued an executive order directing the institute to reduce its work and personnel “to the minimum presence and function required by law.”

In the statement on Saturday, Gallegos asserted that institute is independent but “committed to the cooperation and comity with the Trump Administration.”

Last week, U.S. marshals escorted DOGE representatives into the Washington offices of another agency mentioned in that executive order, the U.S. African Development Foundation.

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Trump’s grievance-filled speech at the Justice Dept. makes clear his quest for vengeance is personal.

But when President Trump appeared in the gilded room on Friday afternoon, he did something different: He delivered a grievance-filled attack on the very people who have worked in the building and others like them. As he singled out some targets of his rage, he appeared to offer his own vision of justice in America, one defined by personal vengeance rather than by institutional principles.

“These are people that are bad people, really bad people,” Mr. Trump said. “They tried to turn America into a corrupt communist and third-world country, but in the end, the thugs failed and the truth won.”

Among those Mr. Trump lashed out at were Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer who took the lead in fighting his attempts to challenge his loss in the 2020 election, and Mark F. Pomerantz, a prosecutor who worked on an early version of a criminal case against him in Manhattan; efforts in the case ultimately led to Mr. Trump’s conviction last year on dozens of state felony charges.

His anger rising, Mr. Trump went on to assail Mr. Pomerantz’s former boss, Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, and the former special counsel, Jack Smith, who had accused him in separate criminal indictments of illegally holding on to classified materials and of using lies and fraud to remain in office at the end of his last term in the White House.

Delving into the past, Mr. Trump also attacked James B. Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., who had opened an investigation into ties between Russia and his 2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Trump announced to his audience at the Justice Department, where Mr. Comey worked for years, that he was proud to have gotten rid of him.

“It was a great honor for me to fire — I will tell you this, a great honor to fire James Comey, a great, great honor,” he said. “That was nothing. There was no better day.”

Mr. Trump identified other enemies in his speech, including Norm Eisen, a lawyer who oversaw the first impeachment accusing him of trying to strong-arm Ukraine into investigating Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the run-up to the 2020 election. Mr. Eisen has also played a central role in bringing civil cases against Mr. Trump challenging his efforts to expand presidential powers and slash the federal work force.

In an email, Mr. Eisen said the president had complained multiple times in recent weeks after he had secured court victories against the administration by “protecting the Constitution and innocent Americans targeted by Trump’s abuses.”

“If Trump thinks we are going to slow down because of anything he says, he’s wrong,” Mr. Eisen wrote. “In fact, we take this as a backhanded acknowledgment of our success and we are going to redouble our efforts to defend the Constitution and the American people.”

In offering his litany of complaints, Mr. Trump provided no proof that Mr. Eisen or any of the others had committed crimes or even ethical violations. Their sole offense appeared to have been trying to hold him accountable for his behavior.

Mr. Trump used his remarks not only to go after his foes, but also to extol those he believed to be friends. He lavished praise, for instance, on Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Florida jurist who dismissed his classified documents case last summer in a ruling that determined — against decades of precedent — that Mr. Smith had been unlawfully appointed to his job as special counsel.

“She was the absolute model of what a judge should be,” Mr. Trump declared. “And she was strong and tough.”

The charges dismissed by Judge Cannon — which were backed up by extensive evidence collected by Mr. Smith’s prosecutors and F.B.I. agents — were “bullshit,” Mr. Trump said, failing to note that the judge had thrown out the case not on the merits of the evidence but rather on the circumstances of Mr. Smith’s appointment.

Over more than an hour, Mr. Trump, relying on a series of twisted facts and misrepresentations, accused his adversaries both inside and outside the department of weaponizing the justice system against him.

The campaign-style address suggested that Mr. Trump would not soon let go of his anger at federal prosecutors and that he intended to make good on his longstanding vows to seek retaliation against them.

“We must be honest about the lies and abuses that have occurred within these walls,” he declared. “Unfortunately, in recent years, a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and good will built up over generations.”

Mr. Trump detailed a list of the retributive actions he has already taken, including stripping security clearances from Mr. Smith and Mr. Bragg as well as firing senior officials of the F.B.I. who, as he put it, misdirected resources to “send SWAT teams after grandmothers and J6 hostages” — references to the rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Hours later, the White House announced an executive order suspending the security clearances of people at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the law firm where Mr. Pomerantz was a partner before joining the Manhattan district attorney’s office about a decade later.

And in between tangential complaints about the news media and the safety of the New York City subway, he promised to do more to punish his adversaries, albeit in an unspecified way.

“We will expose and very much expose their egregious crimes and severe misconduct of which was levels you’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “It’s going to be legendary. It’s going to also be legendary for the people that are able to seek it out and bring justice. We will restore the scales of justice in America, and we will ensure that such abuses never happen again in our country.”

The C.F.P.B., a target of Trump, refuses to die.

But the consumer bureau has refused to die.

Last week, the agency’s consumer response team was called back to work to tackle a backlog of 16,000 complaints, including dozens from homeowners facing imminent foreclosures. The bureau’s Fair Lending Office has resumed preparing its annual report to Congress. And the front page of the agency’s website, which had generated a 404 error message starting on the day Trump officials arrived at the bureau, is working again.

The consumer bureau is emerging as a test case for the boundaries of President Trump’s power to unilaterally hobble government agencies. For nearly a month, the bureau’s staff union and other groups have battled the Trump administration in federal court cases in Washington and Maryland, arguing that only Congress can formally close the bureau, which was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

A consent order and series of short-term agreements have temporarily halted, and in some areas reversed, what Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia described as Trump officials’ “shoot first and ask questions later” approach.

But Judge Jackson has yet to rule on the larger question of whether the Trump administration can essentially end the bureau by hollowing out its operations, even if it technically stays open.

The functions that have been restored are only a small fraction of the agency’s total workload, but consumer advocates and the agency’s workers see these court orders as important victories in the broader effort to resist Mr. Trump’s dismantling of federal agencies.

Trump officials have made similar sweeping moves at the United States Agency for International Development and, most recently, at the Education Department.

For years, the financial industry has complained that the consumer bureau, which regulates a range of lending activity from mortgages to credit cards, has been overly aggressive, tying up companies in litigation and red tape and hindering credit from flowing to consumers.

Now, the battle to save the bureau has created some strange bedfellows. Mortgage lenders, which have historically been one of the groups that bristled at the bureau’s oversight, have also pushed for the agency to not be shuttered, at least without careful planning, according to three people familiar with internal discussions at the bureau.

The past month has played out like a cat-and-mouse game between the Trump officials seeking to kill the bureau and workers trying to carry out the agency’s legally mandated duties, according to a review of internal bureau emails, court testimony and interviews with eight current and former employees, who asked not to be identified so they could discuss sensitive agency information.

The Trump administration began moving against the bureau on Friday, Feb. 7. That evening, Russell T. Vought — a Project 2025 author who said in 2023 that he wanted to shut down agencies and leave their employees “traumatically affected”— was named the bureau’s acting director.

Over the next few days, Mr. Vought instructed employees to “stand down from performing any work task” and ordered the termination of nearly 200 contracts with vendors that provide vital pieces of the agency’s infrastructure like software for tracking legal cases as well as the contract with the staffing agency that employed the entire team of customer service agents who answered its consumer complaints hotline.

But almost immediately, Mr. Vought’s attempt at a complete shutdown ran into a roadblock related to an arcane feature of the mortgage industry.

The consumer bureau is responsible for compiling a key mortgage interest rate released each week. Because lenders need that rate to certify that their loans are in compliance with safe-lending rules, the mortgage market would freeze if the bureau abruptly stopped publishing it.

And so the agency’s new leaders allowed employees to restart that function.

It was an early lesson for the Trump administration that shutting down an agency that is deeply woven into American’s financial industry infrastructure is a tricky task.

When Congress created the consumer bureau in 2011, lawmakers assigned it more than 80 specific duties. They include responding to consumer complaints, running dedicated offices to serve military service members and student loan borrowers, and enforcing federal laws governing mortgage lending disclosures, fair access to credit and other consumer protections.

Because they could not legally close the bureau, Trump officials focused on gutting it. Employees were told by their new leaders that the bureau would survive “in name only,” several said in court filings. One senior executive was quoted in the filing as saying the bureau would be reduced to “five men and a phone” stashed in a room somewhere in Washington.

On Thursday, Feb. 13, the bureau’s new leaders sought permission from the Office of Personnel Management to waive the usual 60 days’ notice required for government layoffs.

The personnel office had never before granted that kind of exception, bureau employees involved in the process testified in court. But just 10 minutes after the bureau sent its request, the personnel office approved its plan to cut an estimated 1,175 workers — the vast majority of its employees.

The purge would have wiped out every single employee in several divisions, including the agency’s supervision, enforcement and research units.

Aware that the agency was in a race against the clock, Deepak Gupta, a lawyer for the bureau’s union, sought a restraining order in federal court to prevent the employee terminations.

At 2 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 14, Judge Jackson was scheduled to hold a hearing on Mr. Gupta’s request. Fifteen minutes before the hearing was set to begin, Trump officials emailed the personnel office an urgent request for the final paperwork needed to carry out the layoffs.

In court that afternoon, Mr. Gupta pressed the judge to freeze the mass termination.

“I don’t want to leave the courthouse without some assurance,” he said. “I’m asking that they don’t fire the entire agency tonight.”

Judge Jackson approved a consent order pausing the layoffs. Since then, she has been monitoring whether the Trump officials were addressing the 80-plus tasks Congress had explicitly assigned to the bureau.

At times, Judge Jackson has called out Mr. Trump’s officials for sending contradictory messages.

One worker described receiving an email from Mr. Vought’s team directing employees to continue “statutorily required work” — then getting a text message from his manager, on his personal phone, saying, “Stand down until further notice.”

“We can’t have edicts issued with people’s fingers crossed behind their backs,” Judge Jackson, homing in on those exchanges, said at a hearing on March 3.

Each week, dozens of workers from the bureau have packed Judge Jackson’s courtroom to watch the proceedings, occupying every available bench and crowding into an overflow room. Some scribble down notes so they can relay the latest developments to colleagues following along on group chats.

“We were there to bear witness,” said Catherine Farman, a web developer at the bureau and the president of the agency’s staff union.

Judge Jackson could ultimately lift the temporary freeze on the mass firings, reversing many of functions that have been restarted. The next deadline for extending or ending the pause is scheduled for March 28.

Trump officials are getting prepared if Judge Jackson rules in their favor.

Adam Martinez, an operating official at the bureau carrying out Mr. Vought’s mandates, said in court on Tuesday that the stop-work order and blueprints for a mass layoff had not been rescinded. Planning meetings for the staff purge, another bureau official testified, were held as recently as March 6.

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Trump orders gutting of 7 agencies, including Voice of America’s parent.

Like many of the president’s moves in his wide-ranging effort to shrink the government, the order appears to test the bounds of his authority. Voice of America’s parent, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, for example, is congressionally chartered as an independent agency, and Congress passed a law in 2020 intended to limit the power of the agency’s presidentially appointed chief executive.

Some of the Trump administration’s moves to slash agencies have been halted by federal judges, including on Thursday, when a pair of court rulings called for agencies to reinstate likely thousands of federal employees who were fired last month because they had probationary status.

In an opinion issued Friday evening, a federal judge in California made clear he did not believe the administration’s claims that federal agencies were acting of their own accord when they fired those probationary employees. Judge William H. Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California listed more than a dozen examples of officials telling employees that the mass firings had been carried out at the behest of the Office of Personnel Management.

In addition to Voice of America, the Agency for Global Media funds Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia. The organization, with a budget of roughly $270 million and more than 2,000 employees, broadcasts in 49 languages. It has a weekly estimated audience of more than 361 million people.

By Saturday morning, many journalists and other employees at Voice of America were informed they were being placed on administrative leave, according to an email reviewed by The New York Times. Journalists there said the cuts were so widespread that they would effectively shut down the international broadcaster.

Michael Abramowitz, the director of Voice of America, wrote in a post on social media that “virtually the entire staff” had been put on administrative leave, including him.

“VOA promotes freedom and democracy around the world by telling America’s story and by providing objective and balanced news and information, especially for those living under tyranny,” he wrote.

Mr. Abramowitz added: “For more than 80 years, Voice of America has been a priceless asset for the United States, playing an essential role in the fight against communism, fascism, and oppression, and in the fight for freedom and democracy around the world.”

The media outlets are intended to provide unbiased news to audiences around the world, but Mr. Trump has criticized its editorial decisions since his first term. Mr. Trump had already stirred fears at the agency by tapping Kari Lake, a fierce loyalist who ran unsuccessfully for governor and Senate in Arizona, to serve as a special adviser there.

The other agencies Mr. Trump targeted Friday are the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which works to prevent and resolve work stoppages and labor disputes; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a nonpartisan think tank; the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which funds and supports museums, libraries and archives; the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which works to prevent and end homelessness; the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which provides financial assistance to struggling communities; and the Minority Business Development Agency, which aims to bolster minority-owned businesses.

Within seven days, the heads of the entities are required to submit to Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, their plans for complying with the order and outline which of their functions are statutorily required.

Since Mr. Trump took office, the billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have sought to drastically reshape the federal government by cutting staff and programs. On Tuesday, the Education Department announced it was firing more than 1,300 workers, and after hundreds accepted separation packages, the agency is set to be left with roughly half the number of employees that it started the year with.

Mr. Musk’s group has trumpeted saving taxpayers billions of dollars, though its claims have been undermined by posting error-filled data.

Zach Montague and David Enrich contributed reporting.

Arlington Cemetery’s website loses pages on the Civil War, Black veterans and women’s service.

A part of the site devoted to segregation and civil rights was largely scrubbed. That section once included a walking tour focused on Black soldiers and a lesson plan on reconstruction.

The cemetery, which is operated by the Army, said in a statement on Friday that it remained committed to “sharing the stories of military service and sacrifice to the nation with transparency and professionalism” and that it was working to restore links to the content.

“We are hopeful to begin republishing content next week,” Kerry Meeker, a cemetery spokeswoman, said in an email on Friday.

On Friday, the cemetery’s website still had an active page describing Section 27, which includes the graves of thousands of African Americans freed from slavery. Another active page listed prominent African Americans — including Medgar Evers, Thurgood Marshall and Colin L. Powell — buried on the grounds.

The restoration of any removed material would be carried out in line with President Trump’s executive orders, the cemetery said. One of Mr. Trump’s orders, aimed at schools, urges a crackdown on “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.”

Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, cast the website changes as part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to erase the accomplishments of women and people of color.

“The whole thing is deeply concerning,” Mr. Smith said in an interview. “Even if you have concerns about the way D.E.I. was handled in a number of different places, I’ve never seen a problem within the military.”

He said that the Defense Department seemed to be focused on “fighting cultural fights day in and day out” and that its approach of “being directly hostile to any kind of diversity” would damage recruiting.

The military has moved quickly to remove references to diversity from its websites since Mr. Trump took office. And for about a week, the Air Force paused using an instructional video for trainees about the accomplishments of the first Black pilots in the military, said Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson, head of the Air Education and Training Command.

The changes to Arlington National Cemetery’s website were previously reported by Task & Purpose, a news website focused on the military.

Arlington National Cemetery, which covers 639 grassy, hilly acres in Virginia near the Potomac River, is the resting place of more than 400,000 veterans and is the largest U.S. military cemetery.

Kevin M. Levin, a Civil War historian in Boston who helped identify the website changes, said they would deprive educators of valuable tools for connecting students with history.

“This is an incredibly rich historical landscape,” he said of the cemetery. “And to see any of its history either distorted or erased entirely — as an educator, and as a historian — it’s incredibly troubling.”

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A judge rejected attempts to temporarily stop migrant detention at Guantánamo.

Mr. Trump has said he wants to use Guantánamo’s 30,000 beds “to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” He issued an executive order in January to expand the Migrant Operations Center there “to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens.” The administration has sent two groups of migrants to Guantánamo, but it is not clear how many were considered dangerous criminals.

Days before the hearing on Friday, the Trump administration abruptly returned a group of migrants it had sent to Guantánamo to the United States, without indicating why. It was the second time federal officials had suddenly cleared the base of migrants who had been flown there. In late February, the government repatriated all but one of 178 detained migrants to Venezuela after they spent just a few weeks at the facility. One migrant was brought back to the United States.

Judge Nichols on Friday considered two challenges brought by migrants and advocacy groups on their behalf. Less than 30 minutes after the lawyers finished their arguments, he said the plaintiffs had “failed to established they are suffering irreparable harm” that warranted a temporary order to halt the administration’s policies.

Judge Nichols said that if the government sent any of the migrants in question to Guantánamo, he would be prepared to consider issuing an emergency order. Lawyers for the Trump administration said they would notify the judge if any plaintiffs were sent there, and were instructed to inform the court by Wednesday of how early in the relocation process they would do so.

But Judge Nichols expressed doubts that the plaintiffs would succeed on the merits of the cases, when no migrants remained at Guantánamo.

In the first lawsuit, filed in response to the administration sending Venezuelan citizens to Guantánamo, Lee Gelernt, the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, argued that government had unfairly barred migrants from having in-person access to lawyers.

Sarah Wilson, a Justice Department lawyer, countered that the work of relocating migrants there was still too new to accommodate lawyers, given the logistical challenges and need for security clearances.

The second lawsuit, filed by 10 migrants who claimed to be at risk of being transferred to Guantánamo because of their nationalities and removal orders against them, challenged the legality of the transfers. The plaintiffs asserted that the government has no right to detain migrants outside the United States, and that conditions at Guantánamo were worse than those at domestic detention facilities.

Drew Ensign, a Justice Department lawyer, argued that since immigration enforcement by definition involves moving migrants across borders, the administration could keep migrants with removal orders in American custody overseas. The practice was akin to transporting migrants over international waters from Hawaii to the mainland, Mr. Ensign added, or through other countries while being deported to their home nations.

But Mr. Gelernt called Mr. Ensign’s comparisons misleading, saying the migrants at Guantánamo had not been in transit or in the process of being removed. No prior administration had argued that immigration law gave the government the right to detain migrants extraterritorially, he added.

Mr. Gelernt also pointed to the conditions some migrants were subject to at Guantánamo, including strip searches, shackling and solitary confinement. That treatment is harsher than conditions found in detention centers in the United States, he said, making relocation there unfair and unconstitutional.

Judge Nichols was particularly focused on the question of whether immigration law gave the government the right to detain migrants at extraterritorial facilities. Though he did not offer an answer, he said it was “a serious question.”

But Judge Nichols rejected the migrants’ argument that staying at Guantánamo, however briefly, would cause them irreparable harm. If migrants who brought the lawsuits were moved to Guantánamo, he said, lawyers could demand an emergency order to bring them back to the United States, likely within days.

Outside the courthouse, Mr. Gelernt expressed frustration, saying the administration had sidestepped challenges to its policy by abruptly relocating the migrants.

He suggested that the advocacy groups would try to mount a broader challenge by filing a class-action lawsuit. “We see now what the government is doing by continually trying to” get cases dismissed as moot “by moving people around,” Mr. Gelernt added.

Mr. Ensign said the Justice Department would ask to dismiss the case.