Trump Administration Live Updates: President’s Travel Ban Brings Contradictions and Concerns

“There’s no consistent set of criteria that would lead you to these 19 countries,” said Doug Rand, a former immigration official in the Biden administration, referring to the 12 countries and seven others that face restrictions but not a full ban. “You have a bunch of countries that seem to be politically motivated and then a bunch of random countries with a fig leaf of data to support their conclusion.”

The order, which goes into effect on Monday, bans travel to the United States by citizens of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. And it limits travel from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. It includes some exemptions, including people with existing visas.

Mr. Trump argued that the timing of the ban was spurred by a recent attack in Colorado on a group honoring hostages being held in Gaza in which an Egyptian man has been arrested and charged.

But Egypt — which is both a military partner and a critical mediator in negotiations between Israel and Hamas — was not on the travel ban list. Also omitted were nations that national security officials have long treated as pariahs, including Syria, where Mr. Trump has recently sought to improve relations.

Mr. Rand and other immigration experts noted that nations home to a higher number of people who overstay visas were left off the list.

Spain is not on there, even though more than 20,000 visitors from the nation overstayed their visas in the United States in the fiscal year covering 2023, according to government data. Mr. Trump did, however, include Chad. Roughly 400 people from that nation stayed in the United States longer than their visa allowed during the same time period, according to government data. Just over 5,000 people from the seven banned African countries overstayed their visas in 2023.

Legal experts suggest that the travel ban appears devised to avoid legal flaws that slowed early versions during Mr. Trump’s first term in office.

But the White House has also indicated that working with Mr. Trump on his strategy for mass deportations was a way to avoid getting included. “Several countries have historically failed to accept back their removable nationals, complicating U.S. efforts to manage immigration and public safety,” according to Mr. Trump’s proclamation.

The White House also argued the nations on the list were “deficient” when it came to screening and vetting.

Chad Wolf, the former acting Homeland Security secretary during Mr. Trump’s first term, pushed back on the notion the travel ban unfairly targeted predominately African or Middle Eastern nations.

“Can I help that some very dangerous countries are both Muslim and located in Africa and elsewhere?” he said. “No. I don’t get to pick that. That’s the reality. That’s the world we live in. I understand why people would say, ‘Oh, it’s a Muslim ban 2.0 or it’s just politics.’ The reality and the facts on the ground tell a very different story.”

Mr. Trump’s frequent references to increasing migration to Europe, a continent he has framed as a cautionary tale for America, raised concerns that the true intent of the ban was to cut off immigrants from mostly African and Muslim nations.

When he announced the restrictions on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump promised that his administration would “not let what happened in Europe happen to America.”

Sitting alongside Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany on Thursday in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump said Mr. Merz’s country also has “a little problem too with some of the people that were allowed into your country.”

“We want to get them out now,” Mr. Trump said.

P. Deep Gulasekaram, a professor of immigration law at the University of Colorado’s law school, said that the effort appeared to be “performative national security theater.”

He said that Mr. Trump’s actions — including the attempted deportations of students protesting the war in Gaza, statements about Haitian migrants eating pets during the presidential campaign and the prioritizing of white South Africans to seek refuge in the United States — were pointed in one direction.

“This new proclamation is another step in trying to reclaim a white, Christian America, and capitalize by stoking the fires of racial and foreign threat,” he said.

Others said the selection of the countries on the list did not support the argument that the ban was about protecting Americans from attacks.

“If the ban had been preventing attacks, then why did those attacks not happen when the ban was lifted?” said David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute.

Mr. Bier said that consular officers vet immigrants seeking to enter the United States with visas and that people cannot enter the country based on their word alone.

“The idea that the government is blindly approving applicants from these countries is insulting to the consular officers,” he said. “It’s inaccurate as well.”

Ruth Maclean contributed reporting.

Mr. Pahlawan was taken into custody with three other men. Prosecutors accused him of working with two Iranian brothers affiliated with Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to smuggle the weapon components from Iran to the coast of Somalia. They said his vessel was about to transfer the missile parts to another ship for final delivery to Houthi commanders in Yemen when he was intercepted.

Prosecutors said that Mr. Pahlawan made multiple smuggling runs between August 2023 and January 2024.

The court papers included a curious, unexplained detail: The Iranian authorities had arrested Mr. Pahlawan and other crew members weeks before the Americans captured him, after Mr. Pahlawan’s boat returned to Iran from a smuggling voyage in December 2023. He was released and resumed his operations, prosecutors said.

A federal jury in Virginia convicted Mr. Pahlawan of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. He was also convicted of threatening the lives of his crew members and their families after being boarded. Most of the crimes that he was convicted of have a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, the Justice Department said. Sentencing will be in September.

As Navy SEALs attempted to board Mr. Pahlawan’s vessel last year, one member of the SEAL team appeared to slip off the boarding ladder or was swept away by a wave, officials said. Another jumped into the water to try to save the first officer, but both disappeared below the waves. The Navy declared them dead, and their bodies were never recovered.

A Navy investigation concluded that the SEALs’ deaths were preventable, with a final report criticizing deficiencies in training and procedure. The review concluded that the two sailors sank quickly in the rough Arabian Sea because they were weighed down by heavy equipment.

“I don’t understand why the president has to target us nonstop,” said Frantzdy Jerome, a Haitian asylum seeker with a work permit who works the overnight shift at an Amazon warehouse in Ohio.

There was widespread fear and confusion in immigrant communities across the nation, in big cities with bustling African and Middle Eastern enclaves, and in small towns where clusters of refugees and immigrants were gaining footholds in their new homes.

Those from the affected countries said the ban would wrench families apart by upending travel plans and immigration cases. They said they worried that the ban would foment distrust and hostility toward Muslims and others from the targeted places. And they said that economic and business relationships would be cut off.

The ban is scheduled to go into effect on Monday, and bars travel to the United States by citizens of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. There are some exemptions, including for those who have existing visas or green cards that allow them to live in the country.

Still, officials and community organizations said that they had been inundated by questions, and that they were advising caution. The Los Angeles-area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations quickly released a list of guidelines for those who might be affected: Talk to an immigration attorney, keep important documents “handy and secure,” avoid travel unless it is essential, and stay up-to-date on your rights.

At the Raayan African grocery store at a strip mall in Twin Falls, Idaho, the Somali owner shook his head in disbelief.

“Trump is going to do whatever he wants,” said Abdulwahabu Mukomwa.

Mr. Mukomwa, 40, arrived in the United States in 2013 after living in a refugee camp in Kenya for more than 10 years. Now, he sells cassava root and flour, as well as an array of food, beauty products, clothes and incense that cater to Twin Falls’s thriving refugee community.

“The more you listen,” he said of Mr. Trump, “the more you risk losing your mind.”

One of his customers, Yasser Hamed, a refugee from Sudan, said he learned about the new travel ban on TikTok.

“It’s sad, really sad, when you hear your country is on the list of people they are not welcoming to the United States,” said Mr. Hamed, 40. He has been in the country for more than a decade, runs his own trucking business and is married with three U.S.-born children.

Another customer, the Afghan refugee who worries about being stereotyped, declined to share her name out of fear of retribution, as she bought goat meat, cookies and a yogurt drink. “I know there are terrorists in my country, but we are not all terrorists,” she said. “There are good people and bad people everywhere.”

In Minnesota, where the large Somali diaspora has become an influential cultural and political force, news of the ban on travel to many residents’ home country cast a pall of dread.

“It’s antithetical to what America stands for,” said Hamse Warfa, an entrepreneur who’s based in the Twin Cities region of Minneapolis and St. Paul and who served as a senior adviser in the State Department during the Biden administration. “This is a country with a long history of welcoming strangers, including those who are now in positions of leadership.”

The Twin Cities received thousands fleeing Somalia’s civil war in the 1990s. Since then, Somali community members have enriched Minnesota’s food scene and civic life. In 2018, Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat whose district includes Minneapolis, became the first member of Congress from Somalia.

Abdi Mohamed, 31, the Somali American filmmaker in Minneapolis, said the policies might put an end to the initiatives he has led to foster deeper ties between Somali Americans and Somalis back home.

“To cut us from our homeland is the worst thing to somebody,” said Mr. Mohamed, who was born in a refugee camp in Kenya and immigrated to the United States as a baby.

Despite being a U.S. citizen and legally able to travel to Somalia, he said he was uncertain whether it would be safe to do so.

“There’s bewilderment and fear not knowing whether you’re going to get in trouble — or even for what,” Mr. Mohamed said.

Some immigrants who have been in the United States for decades were more willing to give Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt. In Brooklyn’s Little Haiti, Dolores Murat, a business owner who was born in Haiti and moved to New York almost four decades ago, said that barring travel from her conflict-ridden home country seemed justified.

“The bottom line is it doesn’t fall under President Trump to make Haiti safe,” Ms. Murat said. “It falls under the Haitian government to make Haiti safe for their own people. I think it’s right to do what he’s doing for his country.”

In a section of West Los Angeles where the hub of the large Iranian community is known as Tehrangeles or Persian Square, some immigrants were skeptical that a ban would last.

Roozbeh Farahanipour, 54, who came to America more than 20 years ago to flee political persecution by the government of Iran, wondered if the ban was a negotiating tactic to put pressure on Tehran over its ambitions to build a nuclear weapon.

Still, Mr. Farahanipour, who owns multiple businesses in the area and is the chief executive of the West Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, worried that the ban might close the door on others following in his footsteps.

“I came here with nothing,” Mr. Farahanipour said, adding, “I don’t want to be the last American dream.”

Mohammad Ghafarian sat a couple of storefronts away at the counter of the bakery he owns, waiting for his afternoon cup of Persian tea to cool.

Mr. Ghafarian, who owns the Shater Abbass Bakery & Market, said that he and other merchants relied on Iranian tourism, and that the travel ban might hurt business.

“I’m selling Persian groceries and Persian merchandise,” said Mr. Ghafarian, who first left Iran for Canada in the 1970s before moving to the United States. “But if there is not much Persian, I won’t have good business.”

Sahil, the tech worker from Afghanistan in California, arrived in the United States in 2022, after two of his brothers obtained special immigrant visas for helping the American military. He asked to be identified only by his first name out of fear for his wife’s safety. She had to remain in Afghanistan while the Taliban swept into power.

“I was trying to calm her down and give her hope,” he said. “I said, ‘You will come to the United States, you will be able to work and study.’”

He stayed up until dawn deliberating how to break the news to her about the new ban. “I don’t know how to tell her,” he said, “that it is going to take years to bring her here.”

Jazmine Ulloa and Ana Ley contributed reporting.

The moves add to the transfers, ousters and demotions that have rippled across the F.B.I. as Mr. Patel and Dan Bongino, his No. 2, promise to remake the country’s premier law enforcement agency. The wave of changes, current and former agents say, amount to little more than retaliation, underscoring what they describe as the politicization of the F.B.I. as its leaders seek to mollify Mr. Trump’s supporters.

Critics say Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino, who are clear about their loyalty to the president and lack the experience of their predecessors, are simply doing what they railed about for years under the previous administration: weaponizing the bureau. In a statement addressing his decision to step down, Mr. Feinberg denounced the agency as an organization that had begun “to decay.”

The F.B.I. declined to comment.

The case of Mr. Feinberg appears to be another example of retribution, former officials said. In his statement, he said that in late May, he was threatened with an investigation and the possibility of a demotion because of his friendship with Peter Strzok, a longtime counterintelligence agent who was fired in 2018. “I was informed that, because I maintain a friendship with a former F.B.I. executive who is a critic and perceived enemy of the current administration, I would not be receiving any of the promotions for which I was currently being considered, and that I should actually steel myself to be demoted,” he said.

Mr. Feinberg added that the F.B.I. had intended to have him take a polygraph, or a lie-detector test, about the nature of his ties to Mr. Strzok, which he said are entirely social.

Mr. Strzok was dismissed after it was disclosed that he had sent text messages disparaging Mr. Trump. Over two decades at the F.B.I., Mr. Strzok helped oversee the investigations into Hillary Clinton’s emails and the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. He later sued the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for violating his privacy by sharing his texts with the news media. As part of the settlement, Mr. Strzok received $1.2 million.

Like many other agents, Mr. Feinberg and Mr. Strzok worked together for years in the counterintelligence division. Mr. Feinberg, who is expecting his first child soon, said he had resigned despite the financial hardship of unemployment. He was not eligible for retirement, and said he had not received any explanation of “what policy, procedure or institutional norm I had supposedly violated.”

Working for the current F.B.I. was no longer tenable, he said.

Mr. Evans and Mr. Meador were each singled out for different reasons. Mr. Meador incurred the ire of conservatives with a 2023 memo issued by the office he headed in Richmond warning of possible threats posed by “radical-traditionalist” Catholics.

An internal inquiry by the Justice Department concluded that while the memo violated professional standards, it showed “no evidence of malicious intent.”

On Tuesday, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, accused the F.B.I. of anti-Catholic bias. He added that he was “determined to get to the bottom of the Richmond memo, and of the F.B.I.’s contempt for oversight in the last administration.”

Mr. Meador was put on administrative leave and was expected to retire, although it was not clear when he would do so, the people familiar with the matter said. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Mr. Evans angered Trump supporters who accused of him denying religious exemptions for the coronavirus vaccine when he worked as deputy assistant director for human resources at F.B.I. headquarters.

In particular, Mr. Evans incited the ire of a former agent who has been deeply critical of the agency, among a group of former employees who had been put on leave and call themselves “The Suspendables.”

Mr. Evans survived an initial purge of F.B.I. executives before Mr. Patel was confirmed as director, even though he was told at one point that he would be fired and wrote in an email to colleagues that he had been “given no rationale for this decision.”

Mr. Evans managed to keep his job, but people familiar with the episode say he is being forced to move to Huntsville, Ala., where the bureau has a large campus. He is not eligible for retirement.

The G.O.P. bill raises the maximum credit to $2,500 per child, from $2,000, and includes virtually all middle- and upper-income families. But a third of children would not receive the full credit because their parents have low wages or lack jobs, according to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. Families must reach income targets to receive the full benefit.

Of the 22 million low-income children who would be denied the full credit under the House bill, 17 million would receive no additional help from the House bill, and five million would receive only part of the $500 increase, the study found. Those excluded from the maximum aid include 65 percent of children with single mothers, 51 percent of Black children, 44 percent of Latino children and 40 percent of children in rural areas.

“This is a very large federal expenditure on children, but low- and moderate-income families won’t receive the full benefit, and that’s where the money would do the most good,” said Sophie Collyer, a Columbia researcher and co-author of the study.

The plan to raise the credit, which would cost nearly $25 billion a year, renews partisan jousting over the program’s purpose. Republicans see it primarily as a tax cut, so they direct it toward families who owe income tax, although some needy families with no income tax bills receive partial payments. Democrats would give the credit to all low-income parents, regardless of how much they work or earn, essentially creating an income guarantee to fight child poverty.

By increasing the credit’s value to $2,500 a child, the House bill effectively restores it to its value in 2017, when Mr. Trump raised it. Since then, it has eroded with inflation.

Unlike other measures in the bill, which make deep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, the increase in the credit’s maximum value would not withdraw aid from low-income children. It just omits many from the gain.

A different child tax credit provision in the bill could bar aid to as many as 4.5 million children who are citizens or legal permanent residents, by requiring parents in mixed-status families to provide Social Security numbers, the poverty center found in a separate study with other groups.

In raising the credit, the House bill increases the sum parents must earn to receive the full credit. A single mother with two children would need an income of $40,000, the rough equivalent of a full-time job at $20 an hour. That is nearly three times the federal minimum wage, and higher than the minimum wage in every state. A two-parent family with three children would face an income threshold of $56,000.

Of the 10 states where the Columbia analysis found the largest share of children would be excluded from the full credit, nine are Republican strongholds, including Mississippi (45 percent), Louisiana (43 percent) and Oklahoma (40 percent).

Under current law, about one child in four cannot receive the full benefit. Some Republicans have suggested a willingness to expand the credit’s value for low-income families, though the House bill does not do so. Senate Republicans have not said what they will do. If Congress fails to act this year, the value of the credit will fall to $1,000 per child.

A measure signed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2021 increased the credit and included all low-income children. It cut child poverty to a record low but expired amid unified opposition from Republicans, who called the aid welfare and said it discouraged work.

Jane Waldfogel, a Columbia professor, studied that expansion in her new book, “Child Benefits: A Smart Investment for America’s Future.” Ms. Waldfogel said it reduced hunger and other hardships while increasing parental spending on books, toys and after-school activities. She called that record consistent with child aid in other countries.

“The evidence for its success couldn’t be clearer,” she said.

But Scott Winship of the conservative American Enterprise Institute said a short-lived effort during the Covid-19 pandemic offered few lessons. He warned that an income guarantee could erode incentives to work and marry.

“The child tax credit was designed to reduce the tax burdens of parents who pay taxes, and I think the Republicans were wise to preserve that as its primary focus,” he said.

The move follows similar sanctions imposed in February, when the U.S. government penalized Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor at the court. Mr. Khan had brought a case against Israel over its war in Gaza, and the sanctions have hobbled the work of his team.

The United States and Israel are not members of the court and have long chafed at its efforts to prosecute officials in their governments or militaries. During the first Trump administration, Mike Pompeo, then the secretary of state, announced sanctions against court officials, including the chief prosecutor, for planning to investigate U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

The State Department said that Ms. Bossa and Ms. Ibáñez Carranza had ruled to authorize the court’s investigation against U.S. personnel in Afghanistan. While they participated in an appeals decision that opened the way for that investigation, the court’s pursuit of the American role in Afghanistan was eventually dropped. Mr. Khan announced soon after taking office in 2021 that he would not pursue accusations of torture carried out by U.S. military and C.I.A. personnel in Afghanistan and at so-called black sites in other countries. No formal investigations of specific U.S. personnel have taken place, nor have warrants been issued.

The State Department also said that Ms. Alapini Gansou and Ms. Hohler had ruled to authorize arrest warrants targeting Mr. Netanyahu and the former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant.

“The United States will take whatever actions we deem necessary to protect our sovereignty, that of Israel and any other U.S. ally from illegitimate actions by the I.C.C.,” Mr. Rubio said in a statement.

As a result of the sanctions, all U.S.-based assets of the four judges must be blocked and reported to the Treasury Department. Americans are barred from doing business with them.

Past sanctions against officials at the court have complicated their bank transactions and travel to the United States. Soon after President Trump took office in January, court officials urged staff members to avoid holding U.S. bank accounts. Several American employees have since resigned.

The court condemned the sanctions on Thursday, saying in a statement that they were “a clear attempt to undermine” an international institution that “provides justice and hope to millions of victims of unimaginable atrocities.”

“Targeting those working for accountability does nothing to help civilians trapped in conflict,” the court said in the statement. “It only emboldens those who believe they can act with impunity.”

The I.C.C., established under a 1998 treaty, is the world’s highest criminal court and has the jurisdiction to investigate and try people for war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression. But the court cannot enforce its rulings and relies on its member states to detain people who are accused of crimes.

The court draws its jurisdiction from the Rome Statute, a treaty ratified by 125 countries. The statute formally commits its signatories to arrest a wanted person who enters their soil, but members do not always comply.

Some of the world’s most powerful countries, including the United States, China, Russia, India and Israel, are not members of the court. They do not honor its arrest warrants or hand their citizens over for prosecution.

“I call on the countries that still support the I.C.C., many of whose freedom was purchased at the price of great American sacrifices, to fight this disgraceful attack on our nation and Israel,” Mr. Rubio said.

Amelia Nierenberg contributed reporting.

The sudden suspension of those programs, which she emphasized was done the behest of the Department of Government Efficiency, left states marooned and struggling to provide for their residents, she concluded.

The government had argued that if it were ordered to restore the grant programs, but eventually prevailed in the case, it could stand to lose millions of dollars that would be impossible to recover.

To underscore her point about the critical nature of the agency’s work, Judge Boardman reversed that logic.

“If, at the end of this litigation, the government is vindicated and cannot recover the funds that Congress appropriated for national service,” she wrote, “the funds will have been spent on improving the lives of everyday Americans: veterans, people with substance use disorder, people with disabilities, children with learning differences, Indigenous communities, people impacted by natural disasters and people trying to survive below the poverty line, Any harm the defendants might face if the agency actions are enjoined pales in comparison to the concrete harms that the states and the communities served by AmeriCorps programs have suffered and will continue to suffer.”

Ticking through the diverse services AmeriCorps volunteers provide, Judge Boardman listed a handful of them in her opinion, mentioning disaster recovery after the California wildfires, awareness programs to fight opioid misuse, and teacher residencies that support special education and low-achieving elementary school students.

While the order preserved the programs and their funding across the 24 states involved in the lawsuit, it did not reverse cuts to the agency’s staff of roughly 700 people, which was dramatically downsized.

In April, the Trump administration took a series of steps to dismantle AmeriCorps, including firing nearly 85 percent of its employees and terminating more than 1,000 grants that supported its tens of thousands of volunteers with roughly $400 million in federal funding. It also shuttered the National Civilian Community Corps, a full-time residential volunteer program, recalling about 750 participants in the program stationed around the country.

The moves were spearheaded by Elon Musk and his associates with the Department of Government Efficiency, who descended upon the agency with an eye to dismantling it within weeks, using the same blitz playbook used on other congressionally funded entities like the U.S. Institute of Peace.

A coalition of 24 states and the District of Columbia sued to stop the effort, citing scores of key services that the program cuts had jeopardized.

Especially after the Supreme Court recently weighed whether to prohibit district courts from issuing sweeping nationwide actions, judges have been cautious about delivering such rulings. In her opinion, Judge Boardman, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., detailed her rationale for keeping the order tailored.

In limiting her order to the grants and programs supporting the 24 states that sued, only volunteers working in those states could be restored. That included participants in programs such as VISTA, the agency’s most popular anti-poverty program.

But Judge Boardman found that trying to impose the same limitations on the National Civilian Community Corps would be “neither practical nor feasible” because of its structure. She noted that the program’s members rotate through short-term projects across multiple states in a given year, and could not be returned to work only in service of the two dozen states that sued.

She ordered that the program be returned to the status quo before the Trump administration cuts took effect in April, and that its participants resume their work “if they are willing and able to return.”

Under the program, people could be followed even if they were not themselves on a terrorism watch list or suspected of any crime.

According to Ms. Noem, who made the announcement on social media, the program “failed to stop a SINGLE terrorist attack while costing US taxpayers roughly $200 million a year.”

“The program, under the guise of ‘national security,’ was used to target political opponents and benefit political allies of the Biden Administration,” she said, citing what she said were “documents, correspondence, and timelines that clearly highlight the inconsistent application of Quiet Skies.”

It is not clear whether the program ever prevented an attack on an airplane, or how many people tracked by the program represented any sort of threat. The Quiet Skies program has documented shortcomings. In 2020, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security released a report concluding that it lacked sufficient oversight, including measures to ensure that passenger data was managed responsibly.

Quiet Skies was established during the Obama administration. More recently, it has attracted the ire of conservatives, who have accused former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. of using it to target political enemies, including Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who is now the director of national intelligence.

In the summer of 2024, while Ms. Gabbard was campaigning for President Trump, the T.S.A. briefly placed her and her husband, Abraham Williams, in the Quiet Skies program. Ms. Gabbard was added because of an event she attended at the Vatican earlier that year organized by a European businessman who, at least at that time, was on an F.B.I. watch list. It was not clear why the businessman was placed on the watch list or whether he was on it by mistake.

Ms. Gabbard emerged as a prominent detractor of the program, contending that she had been placed on what she called a “domestic terror watch list” as a result of her criticism of the Biden administration and Vice President Kamala Harris, who replaced Mr. Biden as the Democratic nominee.

Biden administration officials at the time said her placement in the Quiet Skies program was unrelated to her political positions. Ms. Gabbard herself was not accused of wrongdoing, and she remained in the program for a very short time, U.S. officials said at the time. Yet her experience has continued to rally members of the Trump administration against the program.

In a social media post on Thursday, Ms. Gabbard hailed the end of Quiet Skies as “a meaningful step towards restoring the trust of the American people and defending liberty.”

Ms. Noem called on Congress to begin an investigation of the program, alongside her department, “to uncover further corruption.”

In a news release, the Department of Homeland Security also accused the Biden administration of using its influence to get political allies off the same lists.

The agency pointed to the example of William Shaheen, the husband of Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire. The release claimed that Mr. Shaheen had traveled multiple times with a known or suspected terrorist, but was removed from the Quiet Skies list after Ms. Shaheen directly lobbied the T.S.A. on her husband’s behalf.

A spokesman for Ms. Shaheen said she was unaware that her husband had been placed on a Quiet Skies list until this week, and had previously contacted the T.S.A. to inquire why her husband had been subjected to several invasive searches at airport checkpoints.

In a statement, Representative Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the House homeland security panel, shot back at Ms. Noem’s suggestion that the Quiet Skies program had been politicized under Democratic administrations.

“If she is searching for an example of the political weaponization of the department, all she needs is a mirror,” Mr. Thompson said in a statement. “Since her first day on the job, she has been singularly obsessed with politics instead of D.H.S.’s mission of keeping the country secure.”

The tension is laid bare in a set of dueling figures released this week, as the Trump administration tried to renew a set of expiring tax cuts enacted in the president’s first term.

On Wednesday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that House Republicans’ domestic policy bill — which would slash taxes and welfare programs — would swell the federal debt by $2.4 trillion over the next decade. The budget office also estimated that Mr. Trump’s tariffs could reduce deficits by almost $3 trillion over 10 years.

While Republicans derided analysts’ projections on their tax agenda, they still heralded the office’s findings on tariffs. On Thursday, Mr. Trump said the two figures together reflected that his administration would deliver a “tremendous surplus” for the federal budget.

But the president omitted other key findings from the congressional scorekeepers. For one thing, they noted that steep duties on America’s closest trading partners could slow economic growth and cause consumer prices to rise — a conclusion that other economists have made in recent months as well.

The budget estimate also hinged on the tariffs remaining in place for the next 10 years, even though the president has signaled on different occasions that tariffs could be a means to an end for negotiating better trade deals — suggesting that the import taxes may not be long lasting.

Brett Loper, the executive vice president of policy at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a group that supports deficit reduction, said this week that the tension reflected the adage that you “can’t have your cake and eat it too.”

“The goal they have clearly laid out is one of negotiation,” added Mr. Loper, who said revenues would fall if the government opted to “negotiate away the tariffs.”

Mr. Trump’s top aides have said they hope to broker as many as 90 deals in 90 days, suggesting they are open to lowering tariff rates in exchange for favorable agreements, much as they did with China after the two sides reached a deal in Geneva that has become the renewed subject of haggling.

The budget office specifically warned about these limitations in its estimate, citing the fact that the administration “could change how the tariff policies are administered,” and as a result, revenues could change considerably, too.

Many of Mr. Trump’s steepest tariffs remain the subject of a heated legal dispute, after a group of businesses and a coalition of states sued the administration and won an initial court ruling that declared many of the duties to be illegal. The government has appealed, and the tariffs remain in place, but the outcome of that litigation could greatly affect the amount of money that the president’s trade policies can generate.

But on Thursday, a group of immigrant rights organizations and criminal defense lawyers took a different approach to stopping the deportations to El Salvador. They filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to invalidate the underlying agreement between the U.S. and Salvadoran governments by declaring it unlawful.

“Disappearing people into foreign black sites is un-American,” said Skye Perryman, the president and chief executive of Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal group that helped file suit. “It is not immigration policy — it’s an abuse of power.”

The suit, filed in Federal District Court in Washington, makes several arguments that the agreement between the White House and the Bukele administration is illegal. The lawyers say it has resulted in violations of constitutional due process protections, the right to a public trial and the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The suit also claims that the agreement bypasses traditional immigration law and violates the United Nations Convention Against Torture because the prison to which scores of migrants have been sent, the so-called Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, is a notoriously brutal facility known for human rights abuses.

While at least three federal judges overseeing deportation cases have ordered the administration to provide them with a copy of the agreement, it has not yet been made public.