Trump budget draft ends Narcan program and other addiction measures.

And the arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan comes after months of rising tensions between the Trump administration and the judiciary, in which the president and his top advisers have repeatedly assailed “local judges” for halting or questioning actions taken by the administration, particularly when it comes to immigration cases.

Charging documents described a confrontation last Friday at Judge Dugan’s courthouse, in which federal agents said she was “visibly upset and had a confrontational, angry demeanor” when a group of immigration, D.E.A. and F.B.I. agents came to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a citizen of Mexico who was in her courtroom to face domestic violence charges.

According to the criminal complaint, the judge confronted the agents and told them to talk to the chief judge of the courthouse. She then returned to her courtroom.

“Despite having been advised of the administrative warrant for the arrest of Flores-Ruiz, Judge Dugan then escorted Flores-Ruiz and his counsel out of the courtroom through the ‘jury door,’ which leads to a nonpublic area of the courthouse,” said the complaint, which was written by an F.B.I. agent.

A Drug Enforcement Administration agent spotted Mr. Flores-Ruiz leaving the building and notified his colleagues, according to the complaint. Agents approached him on the street outside the courthouse. “A foot chase ensued,” the complaint said. “The agents pursued Flores-Ruiz for the entire length of the courthouse” before catching and arresting him, the complaint said.

The judge was charged with obstructing a proceeding of a federal agency and concealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest.

After a brief appearance as a defendant in federal court in Milwaukee, about a mile from her own courthouse, the judge was released on her own recognizance.

The bureau arrested Judge Dugan on suspicion that she “intentionally misdirected federal agents,” F.B.I. Director Kash Patel wrote on social media on Friday, before the charges were unsealed.

David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, criticized the F.B.I.’s handling of the case.

“It is clear that the F.B.I. is politicizing this situation to make an example of her and others across the country who oppose their attack on the judicial system and our nation’s immigration laws,” he said in a statement.

Attorney General Pam Bondi defended the arrest of the judge, telling Fox News that when someone obstructs justice by “escorting a criminal defendant out a back door, it will not be tolerated.”

“It doesn’t matter who you are, you’re going to be prosecuted,” Ms. Bondi said.

Ms. Bondi also discussed the recent arrest of a former judge in New Mexico who was charged with obstruction over harboring someone federal agents say was a Venezuelan gang member.

“Some of these judges think they’re above the law. They are not,” she said. “We will come after you and prosecute you. We will find you.”

Christopher A. Wellborn, the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, reacted with alarm to the judge’s arrest, saying American democracy “rests upon the independence of the judiciary.”

“Retaliatory action from the executive branch that appears to undermine this foundation demands our unwavering scrutiny and a resounding response,” he added.

The chief judge in Milwaukee County, Carl Ashley, said in a statement that Judge Dugan’s caseload would be handled by another jurist in the courthouse and declined to comment further.

The Trump administration has vowed to investigate and prosecute local officials who do not assist federal immigration enforcement efforts, denouncing what they call “sanctuary cities” for not doing more to assist federal apprehensions and deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants.

At the Justice Department, senior officials have urged prosecutors to look for cases in which local authorities, whether they are municipal, state or court officials, have tried to stop or hinder immigration agents.

The Milwaukee case involves a frequent flashpoint in that debate, when immigration agents try to arrest immigrants who are appearing in state court. Local authorities often chafe at such efforts, arguing they endanger public safety if people dealing with relatively minor legal issues feel it is unsafe to enter courthouses.

The charging papers against Judge Dugan suggested she was incensed to learn immigration agents were in the courthouse, and she called it “absurd,” according to one witness.

At first, the judge asked the immigration agent if he was in the courthouse for a hearing, and when the agent said no, the judge “stated that the agent ‘would need to leave the courthouse,’” according to the complaint.

Judge Dugan then asked the agent if they had a judicial warrant, to which the agent replied no, it was an administrative warrant, according to the complaint. I.C.E. typically uses administrative warrants, which are issued by the agency to apprehend people.

Such warrants do not carry the same authority as a warrant issued by a judge, meaning people in their homes typically don’t need to open their doors to immigration agents with only an administrative warrant.

In the first Trump administration, a local Massachusetts judge was indicted by the Justice Department on charges of obstructing immigration authorities. The charges were dropped after the judge agreed to refer herself to potential judicial discipline.

That case also involved allegations that a judge allowed a defendant being sought by I.C.E. agents to leave the building via a back door in order to avoid detention. The Massachusetts Judicial Conduct Commission has filed formal disciplinary charges against Judge Shelley Joseph. She has denied wrongdoing.

Glenn Thrush, Julie Bosman and Chris Cameron contributed reporting.

Judge Dugan, widely known in progressive circles in Milwaukee, was elected by a wide margin in 2016, beating an incumbent appointee of Scott Walker, the Republican former governor of Wisconsin. Judge Dugan was unopposed for re-election in 2022. Her current term expires in 2028.

In 2023, she dismissed a lawsuit brought by the Republican Party of Wisconsin that argued a get-out-the-vote effort in Milwaukee violated the law.

Judge Dugan, 65, graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1987 and took a job at Legal Action of Wisconsin, a group that provides free legal services. She worked as a lawyer specializing in housing, public benefits and Social Security cases, and was the coordinator of the organization’s pro bono attorney program from 1990 to 1994, according to her LinkedIn page.

She later worked as the executive director for Catholic Charities of Southeastern Wisconsin. Judge Dugan has also served on the Milwaukee County Ethics Board.

As a lawyer for Legal Aid, Judge Dugan took on cases defending the indigent. In 1995, she represented people who panhandled on downtown sidewalks, arguing that banning them from doing so was unconstitutional.

In 2000, she argued that a surge in tickets written for “quality-of-life” issues had resulted in intimidation.

“Anecdotally, from my clients, people don’t want to go to court, much less to trial, because they’ve been particularly intimidated by officers,” she told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel at the time. “We’ve seen an increase in complaints of harassment and abuse.”

Judge Dugan lost a judicial race in 2012. During the campaign, she said she was nonpartisan and would be impartial, according to the Journal Sentinel.

“Justice is hard work. Everyone knows that,” she said.

Julius Kim, a criminal defense lawyer in Milwaukee who has known Judge Dugan for years, said on Friday that she is known for advocating on behalf of people who are “underrepresented in the justice system.”

“Social justice issues are close to her heart,” he said. “But that being said, I don’t think she’s known by any stretch to be any kind of pushover in the courthouse, either. I think she takes her obligations seriously as a judge.”

In 2021, Judge Dugan was a finalist in the “Most Trusted Public Official” category in the Best of Milwaukee contest in The Shepherd Express, an alternative publication.

In an article she wrote that year detailing the history of women in Wisconsin’s legal profession, Judge Dugan noted that a “passion project” of hers was to have her picture taken outside of every courthouse in Wisconsin.

With the notable exception of the United States, nearly every country in the world is party to a treaty on marine and maritime activities that went into force in 1994, called the Law of the Sea Convention. That the United States has never ratified the treaty is in part what allowed Mr. Trump to unilaterally decide that the government could issue permits for mining the seabed in areas beyond American territorial jurisdiction.

The White House has argued that extracting critical minerals such as cobalt and nickel from nodules on the ocean floor is crucial to its supply of metals that go into a plethora of advanced technologies. On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency that will be tasked with issuing seabed mining permits, said the Trump administration had unlocked “the next gold rush.”

Dozens of countries have called for a moratorium on seabed mining, and even those, like China, who have been keen to see seabed mining take place, have urged restraint until the International Seabed Authority, an agency created under the treaty, agrees on rules for how companies can go about extracting minerals from the deep sea.

Many scientists see deep-sea mining as environmentally risky. It has never been done at commercial scale before, and the deep sea is one of the planet’s least understood ecosystems.

Many countries rebuked the Trump administration’s embrace of seabed mining several weeks ago, when a Canadian mining outfit, the Metals Company, announced that its American subsidiary would apply directly to the U.S. government for a permit for deep-sea mining in international waters.

Environmental groups expressed outrage over the executive order.

“Trump is trying to open one of Earth’s most fragile and least understood ecosystems to reckless industrial exploitation,” said Emily Jeffers, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The deep ocean belongs to everyone and protecting it is humanity’s global duty. The sea floor environment is not a platform for ‘America First’ extraction.”

Companies have been exploring the seabed for minerals for more than a decade. The richest zone they have found is in the Eastern Pacific, in an area called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which occupies a vast span under the ocean between Mexico and Hawaii.

Permitting in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone would be handled by the Commerce Department, through NOAA, which has been hit by large scale cuts to its funding and work force since Mr. Trump took office.

“NOAA provides Americans with accessible and accurate weather forecasts; it tracks hurricanes and tsunamis; it responds to oil spills; it keeps seafood on the table; and so much more,” said Jeff Watters at the nonprofit group Ocean Conservancy. “Forcing the agency to carry out deep-sea mining permitting while these essential services are slashed will only harm our ocean and our country.”

The announcement followed a wave of individual lawsuits filed by students who have said they were notified that their legal right to study in the United States was rescinded, often with minimal explanation. In some cases, students had minor documented traffic violations or other infractions. But in other cases, there appeared to be no obvious cause for the revocations.

It was not clear how many student visa holders had left the country; students usually have at least a few weeks before they have to leave. But the Trump administration had stoked panic among students who found themselves under threat of detention and deportation with minimal explanation. A handful of students, including a graduate student at Cornell, have voluntarily left the country after abandoning their legal fight.

In March, the Trump administration moved to cancel visas and begin deportation proceedings against a number of students who had participated in demonstrations against Israel during the wave of campus protests last year over the war in Gaza. Federal judges had halted some of those revocations and slammed the brakes on efforts to remove those students from the country.

But in recent weeks, hundreds of students, including many from India and China, received word that their visas had been revoked. That caused a wave of panic across the country among students and academics whose prospects of finishing a degree or completing graduate research were upended without warning.

A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During the hearing on Friday, Mr. Carilli said the government was prepared to file the policy change across other lawsuits, potentially providing some reprieve for students who had sued to have their visas reinstated and remain in the country through graduation ceremonies in the spring.

Other lawsuits, including a potential class action in New England, have been filed seeking to stop the administration from more broadly from carrying out further cancellations.

Technically, the president’s blueprint is merely a formal recommendation to Congress, which must ultimately adopt any changes to spending. The full extent of President Trump’s proposed cuts for 2026 is not yet clear. Rachel Cauley, a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget, said in a statement that “no final funding decisions have been made.”

But early indications suggest the budget will aim to formalize Mr. Trump’s disruptive reorganization of the federal government. That process — largely overseen by the tech billionaire Elon Musk — has frozen billions of dollars in aid, shuttered some programs and dismissed thousands of workers from their jobs, prompting numerous court challenges.

The early blueprint reflects Mr. Trump’s long-held belief that some federal antipoverty programs are unnecessary or rife with waste, fraud and abuse. And it echoes many of the ideas espoused by his budget director, Russell T. Vought, a key architect of Project 2025 who subscribes to the view that the president has expansive powers to ignore Congress and cancel spending viewed as “woke and weaponized.” He previously endorsed some of the cuts to housing, education and other programs that Mr. Trump is expected to unveil in the coming days.

The White House is expected to release the budget as soon as next week, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the highly secretive process. The president is expected to couple his blueprint for 2026 with a second measure — also set for release next week — that would slash more than $9 billion in previously approved spending for the current fiscal year, including money that funds PBS and NPR.

In total, the proposed cuts are likely to inform Republican lawmakers as they look for ways to fund their economic agenda, including a package that would extend and expand a set of tax cuts enacted during Mr. Trump’s first term. Their ambitions are projected to cost trillions of dollars, though Republican leaders have explored whether to invoke a budget accounting trick to make it seem as though their tax package does not add considerably to the federal debt.

In an interview with Time published on Friday, Mr. Trump suggested that he liked the idea of making millionaires pay higher taxes to help offset tax cuts for others but also said it would be politically untenable.

Some of the cuts the administration is envisioning could exacerbate the federal deficit. The White House is looking to reduce about $2.5 billion from the budget of the Internal Revenue Service with the goal of ending the Biden administration’s “weaponization of I.R.S. enforcement,” which it said targeted conservatives and small businesses. Budget scorekeepers have previously said that cuts to the I.R.S. would reduce the amount of revenue coming into the government, since it would make it harder for the tax collector to go after businesses and people who owe money but do not pay.

In many cases, the draft budget slashes many federal antipoverty programs, generally by cutting their funds and consolidating them into grants sent to the states to manage. The full extent of those changes is not clear, but the result could be fewer programs and dollars serving low-income Americans, who may be at risk of losing some benefits.

Among the most prominent programs that could be eliminated is Head Start, which provides early education and child care for some of the nation’s poorest children.

Documents reviewed by The Times show the White House is considering a $12.2 billion cut, which would wipe out the program. The budget document says Head Start uses a “radical” curriculum and gives preference to illegal immigrants. A description of the program also criticizes it for diversity, equity and inclusion programming and the use of resources that encourage toddlers to welcome children and families with different sexual orientations.

Despite the Trump administration’s pledge to make housing more affordable, the budget draft would reduce funding for several programs that support housing developments or provide rental assistance. The budget proposes saving $22 billion by replacing the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s rental assistance programs with a state-based initiative that would have a two-year cap on rent subsidies for healthy adults.

The draft budget also eliminates the Home Investment Partnerships Program, cutting the $1.25 billion fund that provides grants to states and cities for urban development projects on the basis that it is “duplicative” of other federal housing programs. It also cuts the $644 million housing block grant programs for Native Americans and Native Hawaiians, saying that these would be unnecessary because of new, unspecified initiatives such as enhanced “opportunity zones” that would give states greater incentives to provide affordable housing.

The overhaul of the nation’s health research apparatus, a few years after the coronavirus pandemic killed millions of people around the world, could also be drastic, with about $40 billion in proposed cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The draft budget recommends cutting $8.8 billion from the National Institutes of Health, which it declared has “broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.”

The proposal would consolidate and shrink some of the agency’s core functions that focus on chronic diseases and epidemics. It would entirely eliminate funding for some divisions, such as the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, which would lose the $534 million that it currently receives.

The budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be almost halved, to $5.2 billion from $9.2 billion. Associated programs such as the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response would be eliminated. A note in the preliminary document refers to overdose prevention funding by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration as the “Biden crack pipe.”

Although Mr. Trump has said he prioritizes “law and order” in his presidency, his budget proposes about $2 billion of combined cuts to the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The D.E.A. cuts would scale back international counternarcotics efforts in European countries that are equipped to crack down on drug trafficking. The A.T.F. cuts would eliminate offices at the agency that the Trump administration says have “criminalized law-abiding gun ownership through regulatory fiat.”

The proposal said the goal was to invest in getting F.B.I. agents into the field and to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the bureau that were “pet projects” of the Biden administration.

“Importantly, this administration is committed to undoing the weaponization of the F.B.I. that pervaded during the previous administration, which included targeting peaceful, pro-life protesters, concerned parents at school board meetings and citizens opposed to radical transgender ideology,” said the note explaining the proposed cuts.

As part of Mr. Trump’s “America First” approach, the budget draft calls for more than $16 billion in combined cuts for economic and disaster support for Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia, as well as humanitarian and refugee assistance and U.S.A.I.D. operations.

“To ensure every tax dollar spent puts America First, all foreign assistance is paused,” the draft budget document said. “To be clear, this is not a withdrawal from the world.”

States and local governments have other resources for obtaining doses of Narcan, which is also known by its generic name, naloxone. One of the main sources, a program of block grants for states to use to pay for various measures to combat opioid addiction, does not appear to have been cut.

But addiction specialists are worried about the symbolic as well as practical implications of shutting down a federal grant designated specifically for naloxone training and distribution.

“Reducing the funding for naloxone and overdose prevention sends the message that we would rather people who use drugs die than get the support they need and deserve,” said Dr. Melody Glenn, an addiction medicine physician and assistant professor at the University of Arizona, who monitors such programs along the state’s southern border.

Neither the Department of Health and Human Services nor the White House’s drug policy office responded to requests for comment.

Although budget decisions are not finalized and could be adjusted, Dr. Glenn and others see the fact that the Trump administration has not even opened applications for new grants as another indication that the programs may be eliminated.

Other addiction-related grants on the chopping block include those offering treatment for pregnant and postpartum women; peer support programs typically run by people who are in recovery; a program called the “youth prevention and recovery initiative”; and programs that develop pain management protocols for emergency departments in lieu of opioids.

The federal health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has long shown a passionate interest in addressing the drug crisis and has been outspoken about his own recovery from heroin addiction. The proposed elimination of addiction programs seems at odds with that goal. Last year, Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign produced a documentary that outlined federally supported pathways out of addiction.

The grants were awarded through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an agency within the federal health department that would itself be eliminated under the draft budget proposal, though some of its programs would continue under a new entity, the Administration for a Healthy America.

In 2024, recipients of the naloxone grants, including cities, tribes and nonprofit groups, trained 66,000 police officers, fire fighters and emergency medical responders, and distributed over 282,500 naloxone kits, according to a spokesman for the substance abuse agency.

“Narcan has been kind of a godsend as far as opioid epidemics are concerned, and we certainly are in the middle of one now with fentanyl,” said Donald McNamara, who oversees naloxone procurement and training for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “We need this funding source because it’s saving lives every day.”

Matthew Cushman, a fire department paramedic in Raytown, Mo., said that through the naloxone grant program, he had trained thousands of police officers, firefighters and emergency medical responders throughout Kansas City and western rural areas. The program provides trainees with pouches of naloxone to administer in the field plus “leave behind” kits with information about detox and treatment clinics.

In 2023, federal figures started to show that national opioid deaths were finally declining, progress that many public health experts attribute in some measure to wider availability of the drug, which the Food and Drug Administration approved for over-the-counter sales that year.

Tennessee reports that between 2017 and 2024, 103,000 lives saved were directly attributable to naloxone. In Kentucky, which trains and supplies emergency medical workers in 68 rural communities, a health department spokeswoman noted that in 2023, overdose fatalities dropped by nearly 10 percent.

And though the focus of the Trump administration’s Office of National Drug Control Policy is weighted toward border policing and drug prosecutions, its priorities, released in an official statement this month, include the goal of expanding access to “lifesaving opioid overdose reversal medications like naloxone.”

“They immediately reference how much they want to support first responders and naloxone distribution,” said Rachel Winograd, director of the addiction science team at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, who oversees the state’s federally funded naloxone program. “Juxtaposing those statements of support with the proposed eliminations is extremely confusing.”

Mr. Cushman, the paramedic in Missouri, said that ending the naloxone grant program would not only cut off a source of the medication to emergency responders but would also stop classes that do significantly more than teach how to administer it.

His cited the insights offered by his co-instructor, Ray Rath, who is in recovery from heroin and is a certified peer support counselor. In training sessions, Mr. Rath recounts how, after a nasal spray of Narcan yanked him back from a heroin overdose, he found himself on the ground, looking up at police officers and emergency medical responders. They were snickering.

“Ah this junkie again, he’s just going to kill himself; we’re out here for no reason,” he recalled them saying.

Mr. Rath said he speaks with trainees about how the individuals they revive are “people that have an illness.”

“And once we start treating them like people, they feel like people,” he continued. “They feel cared about, and they want to make a change.”

He estimated that during the years he used opioids, naloxone revived him from overdoses at least 10 times. He has been in recovery for five years, a training instructor for the last three. He also works in homeless encampments in Kansas, offering services to people who use drugs. The back of his T-shirt reads: “Hope Dealer.”

Behind closed doors at one session, Judge Richard J. Sullivan, the chairman of the conference’s Committee on Judicial Security, raised a scenario that weeks before would have sounded like dystopian fiction, according to three officials familiar with the remarks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations: What if the White House were to withdraw the protections it provides to judges?

The U.S. Marshals Service, which by law oversees security for the judiciary, is part of the Justice Department, which Mr. Trump is directly controlling in a way that no president has since the Watergate scandal.

Judge Sullivan noted that Mr. Trump had stripped security protections from Mike Pompeo, his former secretary of state, and John Bolton, his former national security adviser. Could the federal judiciary, also a recent target of Mr. Trump’s ire, be next?

Judge Sullivan, who was nominated by President George W. Bush and then elevated to an appellate judgeship by Mr. Trump, referred questions about his closed-door remarks to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which stated its “complete confidence in those responsible for judicial security.”

There is no evidence that Mr. Trump has contemplated revoking security from judges. But Judge Sullivan’s remarks were an extraordinary sign of the extent of judges’ anxiety over the threats facing the federal bench. And they highlight a growing discomfort from judges that their security is handled by an agency that, through the attorney general, ultimately answers to the president, and whose funding, in their view, has not kept pace with rising threats.

“Cutting all the security from one judge or one courthouse — stuff like that hasn’t happened, and I don’t expect it to,” said Jeremy Fogel, a retired federal judge who directs the Berkeley Judicial Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, and is in frequent contact with current judges. “But, you never know. Because it’s fair to say that limits are being tested everywhere. Judges worry that it could happen.”

The Marshals Service said in a statement that it acted “at the direction of the federal courts” and “effectuate all lawful orders of the federal court.” The integrity of the judicial process, the statement read, depends on “protecting judges, jurors and witnesses.”

Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said Mr. Trump’s decision to strip security from Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Bolton, two former officials, had no bearing on his approach to sitting judges. He called worries that the president would deprive judges of their security “speculation” that was “dangerous and irresponsible.”

Founded in 1789, the U.S. Marshals Service has a wide range of law-enforcement duties, in addition to its central function of supporting the judiciary. There are now 94 presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed U.S. marshal positions, one for each judicial district. The agency’s director reports to the deputy attorney general.

The concerns about who oversees the marshals come as threats against judges have been on the rise, expanding the burdens on the service.

Statistics released by the agency show that the number of judges targeted by threats more than doubled from 2019 to 2024, before Mr. Trump returned to office. In those years, he disputed the result of the 2020 election in court, and the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the ruling that made access to abortion a constitutional right. In June 2022, after the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe leaked, an armed man made an attempt to assassinate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh at his home.

In his end-of-year report for 2024, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. noted “a significant uptick in identified threats at all levels of the judiciary.”

Since Mr. Trump took office in January, he and his supporters have insulted individual judges on social media and called for their impeachment in response to rulings they don’t like. In a message posted on Easter, Mr. Trump referred to “WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges” who are allowing a “sinister attack on our Nation to continue” in regard to immigration.

Judges and their family members have in recent weeks reported false threats of bombs in their mailboxes. As of mid-April, dozens of pizzas have been anonymously sent to judges and their family members at their homes, a means of signaling that your enemy knows where you live.

According to Ron Zayas, the chief executive of Ironwall, a company that contracts with district courts, state courts and some individual judges to provide data protection and security services for judges and other public officials, the number of judges using his services for emergency protection is more than four times the average number for last year. He said 40 judges also used their own money to bolster their security with Ironwall, twice as many as on Jan. 1.

In a letter to Congress dated April 10, Judge Robert J. Conrad Jr., who directs the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, complained that funding for court security remained frozen at 2023 levels through the 2025 fiscal year “at a time when threats against federal judges and courthouses are escalating.” Judges have issued similar warnings for years.

The total amount spent has remained nearly flat, rising to $1.34 billion in 2024 from $1.26 billion in 2022, according to statistics from the administrative office and the marshals, despite inflation and staff pay increases.

At the same time, burdens on the service have grown.

In recent years, the U.S. Marshals said in a statement, they have started helping to protect the homes of the Supreme Court justices, whose security is primarily handled by the separate Supreme Court Marshal’s Office. Last summer, a U.S. marshal stationed outside Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s home in Washington shot and wounded an armed man in an attempted carjacking.

In January, the Trump administration gave the marshals, along with other law enforcement agencies, the new power to enforce immigration laws. That move prompted Judge Edmond E. Chang, who chairs the Judicial Conference’s criminal law committee, to write a memo to all district-court and magistrate judges warning about the potential impact on the marshals’ ability to protect them. (Judge Chang declined to comment; his memo was reported earlier by Reuters.)

In addition to protecting judges’ lives, U.S. law states the marshals’ “primary role and mission” is “to obey, execute, and enforce all orders” from the federal courts. Enforcing court orders can entail imposing fines and imprisonment for anyone judges find to be in contempt of court, including, in theory, executive branch officials.

The Trump administration’s posture in some cases raises the possibility that the already-stretched marshals could emerge as a crucial referee between the branches. In the courtroom, Justice Department lawyers have come close to openly flouting court orders stemming from the unlawful deportation to a prison in El Salvador of a group of nearly 140 Venezuelans and Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whose removal officials admitted was an “administrative error.” Two judges have responded by opening inquiries that could lead to administration officials being held in contempt of court.

“What happens if the marshals are ordered to deliver a contempt citation to an agency head that has defied a court order?” asked Paul W. Grimm, a retired federal judge who leads the Bolch Judicial Institute at Duke University. “Are they going to do that? The question of who the Marshals Service owes their allegiance to will be put to the test in the not-too-distant future, I suspect.”

Concern over the oversight of the Marshals Service is not new. A 1982 report by the Government Accountability Office called the marshals’ oversight arrangement “an unworkable management condition.” As a possible solution, it proposed legislation to move control of the marshals to the judiciary.

Some members of Congress have begun proposing a similar solution.

“Do you think you could better protect judges if your security was more independent?” Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, asked a federal judge testifying on behalf of the Judicial Conference at a hearing in February, two weeks before Judge Sullivan’s remarks.

Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, responded that he considered the question of independent oversight legitimate. The judge answered that the conference would consider the matter.

In an interview, Mr. Swalwell said he was drafting legislation that would put the judiciary in charge of its own security.

Last month, Ronald Davis, who led the agency under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., issued a stark warning on LinkedIn of “a constitutional crisis if a president refuses to enforce or comply with a federal court order.” He too proposed measures to insulate the marshals from potential interference by the executive branch.

In the meantime, the administration’s immediate goal for the Marshals Service may be to shrink it.

On April 15, Mark P. Pittella, the agency’s acting director, sent a letter to more than 5,000 employees of the service as part of the staff-cutting measures associated with Elon Musk’s project, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, offering them the opportunity to resign and be eligible for more than four months of administrative leave with full pay. In the letter, obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Pittella wrote that agency leadership would review applications to ensure they did not “adversely impact U.S.M.S. mission-critical requirements.”

But a spokesman for the service said the offer was open to employees in all areas of responsibility, including marshals tasked with protecting judges.

Mr. Trump’s comments appeared aimed at creating the impression of progress with China to soothe jittery financial markets, which have fallen amid signs that the world’s largest economies are in a standoff. The S&P 500 is down 10 percent since Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.

But the president’s claims of talks have been rejected by Chinese officials, who have repeatedly denied this week that they are actively negotiating with the United States.

“China and the U.S. have not held consultations or negotiations on the issue of tariffs,” Guo Jiakun, the spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said in a news conference on Friday. “The United States should not confuse the public.”

Chinese officials have repeatedly said the United States should stop threatening China and engage in dialogue on the basis of equality and respect. On Thursday, He Yadong, a spokesman for China’s Commerce Ministry, said there were “no economic and trade negotiations between China and the United States.”

“Any claims about progress in China-U.S. economic and trade negotiations are baseless rumors without factual evidence,” he said. The Chinese Embassy in Washington declined to comment on Friday, and White House spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese imports to a minimum of 145 percent this month, in a bid to force China into trade negotiations. But Chinese officials responded by issuing their own tariffs on American products and clamping down on exports to the United States of minerals and magnets that are necessary for many industries, including the defense sector.

The Chinese also appear to have ignored Mr. Trump’s suggestions that the best way to resolve the issue would be for Mr. Xi to get in touch with him directly. With the two governments at an impasse, businesses that rely on sourcing products from China — varying from hardware stores to toymakers — have been thrown into turmoil. The triple-digit tariff rates have forced many to halt shipments entirely.

Trump officials have admitted that the status quo with China on trade is not sustainable, and some have considered paring back levies on the country. But the White House insists it will not do that unless a deal is reached for China to do the same.

Asked in the Time interview if he would call Mr. Xi if the Chinese leader did not call first, Mr. Trump said no.

“We’re meeting with China,” he said. “We’re doing fine with everybody.”

Mr. Trump also said, without evidence, that he had “made 200 deals.” He claimed that he would finish and announce them in the next three to four weeks.

Mr. Trump announced higher “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly 60 countries at the beginning of April. The White House has since said it received requests from dozens of countries to negotiate trade terms, and Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser, has said the administration would strike “90 deals in 90 days.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said this week that the Trump administration had received 18 proposals on paper and that the trade team was “meeting with 34 countries this week alone.”

But many trade experts have expressed skepticism, given that past U.S. trade deals have taken on average over a year to negotiate.

The president told Time that trade with countries like China had been unfair and needed to be changed. “You can’t let them make a trillion dollars from us,” he said.

Mr. Trump said he would look individually at companies seeking exemptions from tariffs. He also said he had a list of products that would be fine to import. “There are some products I really don’t want to make here,” he said.

But Mr. Trump insisted that tariffs were encouraging companies to move back to the United States, and that he would consider having high tariffs a year from now a “total victory” because the country would be “making a fortune.”

“This is a tremendous success,” he said. “You just don’t know it yet.”

In public, Mr. Trump has been saying that his tariffs are working out well, that countries are coming to him begging for deals and that everything will work out beautifully for the American people.

In private, the president’s team has been less cheery. Major retailers have briefed Mr. Trump on their expectations for empty store shelves if his tariffs are kept in place. His top economic advisers, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, were so alarmed by the sell-off in the bond markets, and the potential for a widespread financial panic, that they urged Mr. Trump to put a 90-day pause on his reciprocal tariffs two weeks ago.

Since then, his team has focused on how to de-escalate his trade war with China without appearing to have capitulated.

Mr. Trump and some of his advisers believed that the Chinese economy would be highly vulnerable to U.S. tariffs, given the country’s dependence on exporting to the United States. But they appear to have misunderstood the extent of the president’s leverage over Mr. Xi.

Chinese officials have made clear, through their statements to the news media, that they have not appreciated the bullying tone from Mr. Trump and that any negotiations need to be run through a formal process.

Beijing has also carefully censored and curated information in China about the trade war, and emphasized the country’s resilience and ability to withstand pain.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has seen his poll numbers drop. His approval rating on the economy — always a strength for him — has now become a weakness. Republican lawmakers fear a wipeout in the 2026 midterms, compounding the pressure on Mr. Trump to make deals that will restore a sense of economic well-being.

Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University and the former head of the China division for the International Monetary Fund, said both countries seemed to recognize the need to begin negotiations but each wanted to initiate them on their own terms.

“The narrative in Beijing seems to have shifted in recent days, with policymakers there stiffening their backs and feeling that they can ride this out,” he said. “Their perception seems to be that the Trump team will come to them as the U.S. economy is suffering proportionately more damage from the escalating trade war.”

After being asked if he was worried that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel might drag him into a war with Iran, Mr. Trump said: “I may go in very willingly if we can’t get a deal. If we don’t make a deal, I’ll be leading the pack.”

Mr. Trump has said he thought the talks between the United States and Iran were going well, but officials on both sides have not achieved a breakthrough.

Mr. Netanyahu has expressed openness to diplomacy if it leads to the full dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program — a demand that Iranian officials have rejected. Some Israeli officials have expressed concerns that the United States could agree to a deal that leaves some of Iran’s nuclear program in place.

Mr. Netanyahu has avoided a public confrontation with Mr. Trump, but has issued a number of public statements saying Israel will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Last week, The New York Times reported that Israel had planned an attack on Iranian nuclear sites, but was held back by Mr. Trump, who expressed support for attempting to negotiate an agreement with Iran first. Israeli officials have suggested that U.S. support for such strikes was crucial, both to ensure successful execution and to protect Israel against an Iranian response.

Mr. Trump said he did not stop Israel from attacking Iran, but “didn’t make it comfortable for them.”

“Ultimately I was going to leave that choice to them, but I said I would much prefer a deal than bombs being dropped,” he said.

Mr. Trump also said he was open to meeting with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or its president, Masoud Pezeshkian.

Cybersecurity analysts said an American defense secretary’s communications device would usually be among the most protected national security assets.

“There’s zero percent chance that someone hasn’t tried to install Pegasus or some other spyware on his phone,” Mike Casey, the former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said in an interview. “He is one of the top five, probably, most targeted people in the world for espionage.”

Emily Harding, a defense and security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, added: “You just don’t want the secretary of defense’s phone number to be out there and available to anyone.”

The chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, did not respond to request for comment.

Mr. Hegseth’s use of Signal to convey details of military strikes in Yemen first surfaced last month when the editor of The Atlantic wrote an article that said he had been added, apparently accidentally, to an encrypted chat among senior U.S. government officials. The New York Times reported this week that Mr. Hegseth included sensitive information about the strikes in a Signal group chat he set up that included his wife and brother, among others.

Soon after the first Signal chat about Yemen became public in March, Der Spiegel, the German news publication, found the phone numbers of Mr. Hegseth and other senior Trump officials on the internet.

That Mr. Hegseth’s private cellphone number was easily available through commercial providers of contact information is not surprising, security experts said. After all, Mr. Hegseth was a private citizen until Donald J. Trump, who was then the president-elect, announced that he wanted the former National Guardsman and Fox News weekend anchor to run the Pentagon, an $849 billion-a-year enterprise with close to three million employees.

It has now become routine for government officials to keep their personal cellphones when they enter office, several defense and security officials said in interviews. But they are not supposed to use them for official business, as Mr. Hegseth did.

Even low-level government workers are instructed not to use their personal cellphones and laptops for work-related matters, according to current and former government officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

For senior national security officials, the directive is even more crucial, one former senior Pentagon official said.

Mr. Hegseth had a significant social media presence, a WhatsApp profile and a Facebook page, which he still has.

On Aug. 15, 2024, he used his personal phone number to join Sleeper.com, a fantasy football and sports betting site, using the username “PeteHegseth.” Less than two weeks later, a phone number associated with his wife, Jennifer, also joined the site. She was included in one of the two Signal chats about the strikes.

Mr. Hegseth also left other digital breadcrumbs, using his phone to register for Airbnb and Microsoft Teams, a video and communications program.

Mr. Hegseth’s number is also linked to an email address that is in turn linked to a Google Maps profile. Mr. Hegseth’s reviews on Google Maps include endorsements of a dentist (“The staff is amazing”), a plumber (“Fast, honest, and quality work”), a mural painter (“Painted 2 beautiful flags for us — spot on”) and other businesses. (Google Maps street view blurs out Mr. Hegseth’s former home.)

“If you use your phone for just ordinary daily activities, you are leaving a highly, highly visible digital pathway that even a moderately sophisticated person, let alone a nefarious actor, can follow,” said Glenn S. Gerstell, a former general counsel for the National Security Agency.

Government cellphones, by contrast, are far more secure because they are fitted with rigorous government controls meant to protect official communications.

In using that same phone number on Signal to discuss the exact times that American fighter pilots would take off for strikes in Yemen and other sensitive matters, Mr. Hegseth opened himself — and, potentially the pilots — to foreign adversaries who have demonstrated their abilities to hack into accounts of American officials, encrypted or not, security experts said.

“Phone numbers are like the street address that tell you what house to break into,” said James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert. “Once you get the street address, you get to the house, and there might be locks on the doors, and you ask yourself, ‘Do I have the tools to bypass or break the locks?’”

China and Russia do, and Iran may as well, several cybersecurity experts said.

Last year a series of revelations showed how a sophisticated Chinese intelligence group, called Salt Typhoon, penetrated deep into at least nine U.S. telecommunications firms. Investigators said that among the targets were the commercial, unencrypted phone lines used by Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance and top national security officials.

Mr. Gerstell said he had no knowledge of Mr. Hegseth’s phone or if it was subject to attack. But personal phones are typically far more vulnerable than government-issued phones.

“It would be possible, with moderate difficulty for someone to take over a phone in a surreptitious way once they had the number assuming you clicked on something malicious,” Mr. Gerstell said. “And when really sophisticated bad guys are involved, like Russia or China, phones can be infected even if you don’t click on anything.”

Cybersecurity experts said that more than 75 countries had acquired commercial spyware within the past decade. The most sophisticated spyware tools — like Pegasus — have “zero-click” technology, meaning they can stealthily and remotely extract everything from a target’s mobile phone, without the user having to click on a malicious link to give Pegasus remote access. They can turn the mobile phone into a tracking and secret recording device, allowing the phone to spy on its owner.

Signal is an encrypted app, and its security for a commercial messaging service is considered very good. But malware that installed a key logger or keystroke capture code on a phone would allow the hacker, or nation state, to read what someone types into a phone, even in an encrypted app, former officials said.

In the case of Mr. Hegseth’s use of Signal to discuss the Yemen strike plans, spyware on his phone could potentially see what he was typing or reading before he hit “send,” because Signal is encrypted during the moments of sending and receiving, cybersecurity experts said.

One person familiar with the Signal conversation said that Mr. Hegseth’s aides warned him a day or two before the Yemen strikes on March 15 not to discuss such sensitive operational details in his group chat. That chat, while encrypted, was not considered as secure as government channels.

It was unclear how Mr. Hegseth responded to those warnings.

Mr. Hegseth also had Signal set up on a computer in his office at the Pentagon so that he could send and receive instant messages in a space where personal cellphones are not permitted, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. He has two computers in his office, one for personal use and one that is government-issued, one of the people with knowledge of the matter said.

“I guarantee you Russia and China are all over the secretary of defense’s cellphone,” Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, who has suggested that Mr. Hegseth should be fired, told CNN this week.

Christiaan Triebert reported from New York. Greg Jaffe in Washington contributed reporting and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

But at least so far, the one thing the lawyers have not managed to do is protect another — and harder to reach — group of Venezuelan migrants: about 140 men who are already in El Salvador, having been deported there under the act more than a month ago.

Early Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union took another shot at seeking due process for those men. Lawyers for the group filed an updated version of a lawsuit they brought against President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act on March 15, the first that challenged his invocation of the law.

This time, the A.C.L.U. is asking a federal judge in Washington not to stop the men from being sent to El Salvador, but rather to help them return to U.S. soil.

When the A.C.L.U. filed its initial version of the suit, in Federal District Court in Washington, Judge James E. Boasberg issued an immediate order telling the administration to hold off sending any planes of Venezuelans to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act and to turn around any flights that were already in the air.

But that never happened. The administration’s inaction ultimately resulted in a threat by Judge Boasberg to begin a contempt investigation into whether Trump officials violated his original instructions — and now the updated lawsuit.

Altogether, the A.C.L.U. has filed at least seven lawsuits in seven federal courts across the country, challenging Mr. Trump’s proclamation on March 14 invoking the Alien Enemies Act as one of the central tools of his aggressive deportation agenda.

The suits have homed in on two different but related legal issues.

One is a significant procedural question: whether the Trump administration has provided migrants whom officials have asserted are subject to removal under the law with sufficient time and opportunity to challenge their deportations in court.

In a court filing unsealed on Thursday in an A.C.L.U. case in Texas, a top federal immigration official said that the administration had decided that “a reasonable amount of time” for migrants to express their desire to challenge deportations could be as little as 12 hours. The official said that migrants could have at least another day to file their challenges in court.

The other issue the A.C.L.U. has been exploring is more substantive: whether the White House should be allowed to use the act at all against the Venezuelan migrants. The act, which was passed in 1798, is supposed to be invoked only in times of declared war or military invasion against members of a hostile foreign nation.

Trump officials have repeatedly argued that the Venezuelans they are trying to deport are members of a criminal gang called Tren de Aragua and that their presence in the United States amounts to an invasion supported by the Venezuelan government. But that view has been rejected not only by some U.S. intelligence officials, but also by an increasing number of judges considering the A.C.L.U.’s lawsuits.

On Tuesday, for example, during a hearing in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein blasted Mr. Trump’s use of the statute, saying it was “contrary to law.”

Several times, Judge Hellerstein, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, said he believed that Mr. Trump was using the law in inappropriate ways. He noted in particular that the law did not authorize the government “to hire a jail in a foreign country where people could be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment not allowable in the United States jails.”

When Tiberius Davis, a lawyer for the Justice Department took issue with that view, Judge Hellerstein shot him down.

“Your Honor, respectfully, once they’ve already been removed, they’re not in United States custody,” Mr. Davis said. “That’s El Salvador. They’re a separate foreign sovereign.”

“That’s exactly the point,” Judge Hellerstein said.

Another judge, Charlotte N. Sweeney, issued a ruling this week in Federal District Court in Denver determining that Mr. Trump’s proclamation had improperly stretched the meaning of terms like “war” and “invasion” in a way that ran counter to the actual text of the Alien Enemies Act.

“Because the act’s ‘text and history’ use these terms ‘to refer to military actions indicative of an actual or impending war’ — not ‘mass illegal migration’ or ‘criminal activities’ — the act cannot sustain the proclamation,” she wrote.

While the Supreme Court has not weighed in yet on the broad issue of whether the White House is using the statute properly, the court has made a decision on the procedural question of whether Trump officials have given migrants subject to the law due process.

Deciding they had not, the justices ruled in an order on April 7 that the Venezuelan migrants must be warned in advance if the government intends to deport them under the Alien Enemies Act so they can challenge them in court, but only in the places where they were being detained. The justices have not yet laid out their vision of how much — or what type of — warning the migrants should receive.

Still, the A.C.L.U. is using that ruling in its updated lawsuit filed in Washington in tandem with a second Supreme Court decision handed down in a different deportation case. In that decision, the justices determined that the White House had to “facilitate” the release of a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, from Salvadoran custody after officials wrongfully deported him last month in violation of an earlier court order that expressly barred him from being sent to the country.

Lawyers for the A.C.L.U. have sought in essence to merge both of these rulings into a single tool to demand not only that the Trump administration provide the nearly 140 Venezuelans in Salvadoran custody with some way of challenging their circumstances, but also that officials take active steps toward securing their release, since they were not previously given the opportunity to do so.

The lawyers have argued, moreover, that it is appropriate to challenge the deportations in front of Judge Boasberg in Washington even though that is not where the men are currently being held. They say that Washington is the proper venue for legal actions when prisoners are in custody overseas.

But even if this strategy is successful, it could be difficult to force the administration to actually take steps to get the men released from Salvadoran custody.

Mr. Abrego Garcia, for example, remains in El Salvador two weeks after the Supreme Court ordered the White House to help secure his freedom.

Jonah E. Bromwich and Mattathias Schwartz contributed reporting.