Trump Pardons Jan. 6 Rioters and Signs Order on TikTok

Some of Mr. Trump’s first executive orders froze most federal hiring, halted new federal rule-making and revoked roughly 80 executive orders issued by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Here’s what else to know:

• Withdrawing from pacts: Among the orders Mr. Trump signed were a pair ordering the country to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and from the World Health Organization.

• TikTok ban: Mr. Trump said he had signed an executive order to stall a federal ban of the app. The order told the attorney general not to enforce the law for 75 days to give the Trump administration “an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward.” Read more ›

• Administrative actions: Some of the first administrative actions of the Trump administration took place around the time of Mr. Trump’s inaugural speech. Federal officials shut down a government app that allows migrants to schedule appointments to use ports of entry, an option that almost a million immigrants used while it was active.

• Return to the office: Mr. Trump also ordered federal workers to return full time to in-person work. His hiring freeze also specifically targeted the Internal Revenue Service.

• Birthright citizenship: Mr. Trump signed an executive order defining birthright citizenship. The president cannot change the Constitution on his own, but he has made it clear he wants to deny birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, to the children of noncitizens. It is all but certain to be challenged in court.

• Biden pardons: Mr. Trump expressed displeasure about a last-minute wave of pre-emptive pardons issued by President Biden to protect some of Mr. Trump’s adversaries, including Gen. Mark A. Milley. Two of those pardoned, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and former Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, thanked Mr. Biden, saying they had been pardoned “not for breaking the law but for upholding it.”

They were there to celebrate President Trump’s broad grant of clemency to nearly all 1,600 Jan. 6 defendants, though only a dozen of those pardoned remained in this particular jail on the morning of his inauguration. The nightly vigil, which has lasted for close to two and a half years, has served as the emotional epicenter of support for those who have been prosecuted in connection with the violent attack on the Capitol four years ago.

Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran who was fatally shot by the police as rioters tried to storm the building on Jan. 6, 2021, typically kicked off the gathering with a roll call of all the detainees across the country. But not on Monday.

“We’re going to skip that tonight because it’s just a variable,” Ms. Witthoeft said. “Everybody’s getting out.”

Only two men, Andrew and Matthew Valentin, brothers who were sentenced just days ago, walked free on Monday, according to Paul Ingrassia, the newly appointed White House liaison to the Justice Department.

Brandon Fellows, 30, who served time at the D.C. jail after being convicted of, among other charges, obstructing the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory, addressed the crowd. Mr. Fellows, who was photographed smoking marijuana in the office of Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, stressed that those who would be leaving prison had a long road ahead.

“Please keep in mind, the people that are coming out, it’s going to be a little rough — it’s going to be tough,” Mr. Fellows said.

Mary Pollock, 24, had accompanied her father from Florida in hopes of reuniting with her siblings, Olivia and Jonathan Pollock, who were being held at the jail after they broke the terms of their release two years ago by going on the run.

“They’ve kept their spirits up in there,” she said. “They’ve been encouraging the other J6 prisoners.”

The scene outside the jail was a departure from the usual vigil held in the back of the facility, under windows that the detainees can peer out of. Men and women who were imprisoned and their families called supporters throughout the night, updating them on the status of their release — but also to proclaim their innocence, as they ordinarily do.

The crowd had been buoyed by Mr. Trump’s promise to issue sweeping pardons on Day 1 of his presidency. They were already anticipating the fulfillment of another vow of his, to pursue his rivals by prosecuting them. Mr. Trump told NBC News in December that the entire Jan. 6 committee “should go to jail.”

“They need to sit in that jail — not the innocent people,” said Tia Myers, 53, from Fort Thomas, Kentucky, who said she was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and was investigated by the F.B.I. although she did not go inside the building.

Many at the rally sought to rewrite the violent history of the Jan. 6 attack, a narrative that Mr. Trump himself has endorsed at rallies, in news conferences and on television.

“We saw the cops waving everybody in,” Ms. Myers said of herself and others who had come to the Capitol that day out of a false conviction that Mr. Trump had won the 2020 election. She quickly added, “We didn’t go in, obviously.”

Scott Tapley, from Goshen, Ind., who brought his two adult daughters to Washington for the inauguration, as he did four years ago to watch Mr. Trump address his supporters on Ellipse on Jan. 6, said the people who had gone inside did so to protest “peacefully and patriotically,” only to be treated unfairly by the justice system.

“I’m so glad to see they’re being released,” Mr. Tapley said. “This is just an unspeakably joyous, happy day.”

Even before Mr. Trump formally issued his pardons, Peyton, 20, and Sarah Reffitt, 28, were more reserved in expressing their joy. As the daughters of Guy Reffitt, a member of the Texas Three Percenters militia who was the first person to be charged with a crime for Jan. 6, they had seen their lives upended by the events of that day.

Peyton, tears in her eyes, said she wished her father, who was currently detained in Oklahoma, was home so she could annoy him. But her family had a lot of healing to do, she added — her brother, Jackson, had turned her father in to the authorities and their home was raided 10 days after the attack on the Capitol.

She said she believed that her father should be held accountable, but she worried that his time in jail and her mother’s desire to free him were “toxic.”

“Everything else was taken and this is what they were left with.” She added, “They can’t just walk away — it’s sad.”

In the first late-night social media post of his second term, President Trump said that his administration was in the process of removing “over a thousand” Biden administration appointees who had not already resigned.

Trump named four such appointees in the post, including Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had served on the President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council.

“YOU’RE FIRED!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

As of late last year, more than 500,000 migrants had entered the country through the initiative.

The program, which Mr. Trump ordered the head of the Department of Homeland Security to end, served as one of two major legal pathways the Biden administration put in place to try to discourage migrants from crossing into the country illegally. The Trump administration already moved earlier Monday to shut down the other program — a government app that allowed migrants to schedule appointments to enter the country at legal ports of entry.

“These processes — a safe and orderly way to reach the United States — have resulted in a significant reduction in the number of these individuals encountered at our southern border,” Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the Biden administration’s homeland security secretary, said last spring. “It is a key element of our efforts to address the unprecedented level of migration throughout our hemisphere.”

Republican lawmakers viewed the program as a way for migrants with no other access to the United States a chance to enter the country for up to two years and obtain work permits.

“Here’s an idea: Don’t fly millions of illegals aliens from failed states thousands of miles away into small towns across the American Heartland,” Stephen Miller, the architect of much of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy, said on social media in September.

Texas, along with other Republican-led states, sued to end the program and failed. But the Biden administration had already said in October that it would allow the permission for migrants from the four countries to lapse after their two years ran out, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to find other methods to stay in the country or face deportation.

Just hours after Trump’s sweeping Jan. 6 pardons were issued, his new U.S. attorney in Washington, Ed Martin, started dismissing some cases stemming from the Capitol attack, court papers show. Martin has long been an advocate for Jan. 6 defendants and has ties to the Patriot Freedom Project, one of the largest legal fundraising groups for the rioters.

One of the cases that Martin has moved to dismiss is the trial of Jared Wise, a former F.B.I. agent charged with felony civil disorder and assault. Prosecutors say that Wise confronted officers at the Capitol, calling them Nazis and encouraging a mob of Trump supporters to kill them.

But in a separate order, Mr. Trump appeared to go further by giving the military a specific responsibility over immigration enforcement. During Mr. Trump’s first term, the military only supported immigration authorities but did not apprehend migrants. Mr. Trump now directed the Defense Department to come up with a plan in 30 days “to seal the borders and maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of the United States by repelling forms of invasion, including unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking, and other criminal activities.”

While details on the exact plans remained unclear, the directive for the military could run afoul of laws that limit the use of regular federal troops for domestic policing purposes.

Declaring a national emergency broadens Trump’s powers.

As he did in his first term, Mr. Trump relied on the National Emergencies Act, a post-Watergate law that allows the president to declare a national emergency, which enhances his executive powers. The act was intended to enable the federal government to respond quickly to a crisis by creating exemptions to rules that would normally constrain the president.

“The president has a pretty wide latitude in determining what constitutes a national emergency,” said Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “If they say it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, well, unless the courts say otherwise, it’s a duck.”

The law requires that the president inform Congress which statutes he is using as a basis to invoke specific emergency powers. In 2019, Mr. Trump relied on a law that permitted the executive branch to use military construction funds in a declared national emergency.

Congress could intervene, though it is highly unlikely.

Congress is limited in what it can do to stop a president from using his emergency powers. Under the National Emergencies Act, the House and the Senate can pass a joint resolution to end the emergency status if they believe that the president is acting irresponsibly or the threat has dissipated. The law says that if one chamber passes such a measure, the other must bring it up in 18 days.

But Republicans control both chambers of Congress, making it extremely unlikely that Mr. Trump would face pushback from the legislative branch. He could also veto any joint congressional resolution terminating the national emergency.

Courts can curb a president’s emergency powers.

Judges temporarily blocked, and subsequently restarted, Mr. Trump’s use of military funds for border wall construction on multiple occasions before President Joseph R. Biden Jr. came into office and terminated Mr. Trump’s emergency declaration.

The border has also been particularly calm in recent days, especially when compared with the numbers seen a year ago, a development that could undermine Mr. Trump’s assertion that an emergency exists. But that might not matter. The Justice Department is likely to argue in any litigation that the courts should defer to the president’s determination.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

President Trump is currently speaking at the Commander-in-Chief inaugural ball celebrating the U.S. armed forces after participating in a traditional first dance at the event.

“As I said in my Inaugural Address, we will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars we end and perhaps most importantly the wars we never get into,” Trump said at the black-tie event.

After making two speeches at the Capitol, holding a rally, and giving a freewheeling press conference held from behind the Resolute Desk while signing an astonishing number of executive orders, President Trump is now waving a military sword around in the air while dancing to Village People. There’s still an hour to go left in this day.

The executive orders included a mix of administrative measures, such as changing government forms to include only two genders, as well as assertions dismissing the validity of gender identity entirely. A gender identity other than the one assigned at birth, an order said, “reflects a fully internal and subjective sense of self” and “does not provide a meaningful basis for identification.”

The actions also effectively shut down an array of programs and practices aimed at reversing decades of systemic inequities and discriminatory practices that have disproportionately affected Black people and other underserved communities.

Under the orders, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Performance and Personnel Management will coordinate on changing hiring practices, ending equity-focused programs and grants and terminating “chief diversity officer” positions designated during the Biden administration.

The orders deliver on Mr. Trump’s promise to eradicate what his allies consider to be “wokeism” in the federal government, a term that conservatives use to describe racial justice and civil rights advocacy. They are part of an effort that he took up in his first term by rolling back policies boosting affirmative action and transgender rights.

In his Inaugural Address on Monday, Mr. Trump vowed to stop efforts to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.”

He acknowledged that he was being inaugurated on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday and said he would “not forget” that he had gained support among Hispanic and Black voters in the November election.

“We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based,” Mr. Trump said.

His actions on Monday are also aimed at bringing back “biological truth” to the federal government, according to a Trump official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the orders before they were signed.

Mr. Trump ordered federal agencies to recognize a biological, binary definition of sex — male or female and not interchangeable. The government will also eliminate references to gender identity in policy documents, and will order that government-issued documents, including passports and visas, accurately reflect one’s biological sex.

On the first day of his presidency in 2021, Mr. Biden took an essentially opposite position, directing agencies to include sexual orientation and gender identity in any regulations and policies covering workplace discrimination, formalizing protections for L.G.B.T.Q. workers. He extended those directions to schools and students last year.

The order also prohibits the use of federal funds for any use in “promoting gender ideology” through grants or other government programming, as well as the use of public funding for transition-related medical procedures in prisons.

Perhaps the most pointed part of the directive instructs agencies to protect “intimate single-sex spaces,” such as prisons and rape shelters, by denying access to transgender women.

The Trump official said the changes were all aimed at promoting the privacy and safety of women, who the official said had suffered under attempts to cater to transgender workers and students.

Elements of Mr. Trump’s orders were written to explicitly target education institutions, rolling back actions taken during the Biden administration that extended protections under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, incoming officials told reporters on Monday.

The Biden administration had instructed schools that Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which protects students against discrimination based on sex, afforded the same protections to transgender students against discrimination based on their gender identity.

Mr. Trump’s executive actions will undo that policy. The order directs his attorney general to release guidance stating that a Supreme Court decision in 2020 that cemented stronger civil rights protections to transgender workers does not apply to schools and their students, echoing a ruling by a federal judge earlier this month.

At a rally on Sunday, Mr. Trump reiterated his intent to minimize the role of the federal government in steering education policy, saying that he instructed his pick for education secretary, Linda McMahon, to return much authority over the nation’s schools to state legislatures.

“If you do a great job, you will put yourself out of a job, because you’ll be sending it back to the states,” he said he had told Ms. McMahon.

But the executive orders issued on Monday demonstrated the extent to which the Trump administration intends to use the power of the executive branch to compel schools and educators to conform to its vision for social policy.

In his previous administration, Mr. Trump railed against efforts to teach children about slavery and his conservative allies supported the movement to remove books about race and gender from school libraries. He indicated on Monday that the enforcement power of the Education Department would be critical to bringing change to the nation’s schools.

“We have an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves in many cases, to hate our country despite the love that we try so desperately to provide to them,” Mr. Trump said during his Inaugural Address. “All of this will change starting today, and it will change very quickly.”

On his first day of office, Mr. Biden unveiled a racial equity agenda after vowing during his inauguration speech to defeat “white supremacy.”

Mr. Biden ordered agencies to take sweeping steps to address inequity in housing, criminal justice, voting rights, health care, education and economic mobility. His administration also created new offices, like one dedicated to civil rights and environmental justice at the Environmental Protection Agency. Mr. Trump’s order specifically targets Mr. Biden’s “environmental justice” office and personnel for review.

Mr. Trump’s first act in office was to rescind executive orders issued by Mr. Biden including ones he signed on his first day in office in 2021, “advancing racial equity and supporting underserved communities” and “preventing discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.”

The orders were widely seen as cornerstones of Mr. Biden’s civil rights legacy, and infused policy efforts across his administration.

But some of Mr. Biden’s efforts, including the Title IX rules and an Agriculture Department program designed to provide disaster relief to minority farmers, ran into legal roadblocks after critics contended that by aiding one group of people, they inherently harmed others.

The Trump official said that it was fitting that the administration was taking measures on the King holiday to reinstitute equal treatment by eliminating racial “preferences” and diversity programming.

The orders on diversity and gender fit within Mr. Trump’s larger goal of bringing back “American values,” as laid out in a White House statement on Monday on the president’s early priorities.

Mr. Trump touched on the theme in his address, again raising a recent promise to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and proposing to officially rename North America’s tallest peak Mount McKinley after its name had been changed to Denali — its Alaska Native name — under President Barack Obama in 2015.

Mr. Trump’s decision on Monday delivered broad clemency to nearly all of the 1,600 rioters charged with joining the Capitol attack and commuted the sentences of several others. His decision appeared to cover both people accused of low-level, nonviolent offenses that day and those who committed violence.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, still one of the most influential figures in the Democratic Party, condemned the pardons as an “outrageous insult to our justice system and the heroes who suffered physical scars and emotional trauma as they protected the Capitol, the Congress and the Constitution.”

“It is shameful that the president has decided to make one of his top priorities the abandonment and betrayal of police officers who put their lives on the line to stop an attempt to subvert the peaceful transfer of power,” Ms. Pelosi said.

For years, Mr. Trump and his allies have tried to rewrite the narrative around the assault on the Capitol, during which a pro-Trump mob assaulted the police, smashed windows and ransacked offices. Mr. Trump took the final step in lending support to the defendants on Monday by wiping their records clean and portraying them as victims, or even “hostages” of what he has repeatedly cast as an unfair justice system.

“Republicans cannot claim to be the party of law and order while pardoning and commuting the sentences of individuals who brutally assaulted law enforcement officers in service of a violent insurrection,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, adding: “These defendants were convicted by a jury of their peers for participating in an attack that included direct assaults on law enforcement, vandalism, trespassing, and an attempt to overturn a free and fair election through the use of force.”

The assault on the Capitol has created a political dynamic in which Republicans, who often cast themselves as the party of law and order, have taken the side of rioters who attacked the police, said Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado.

“President Trump’s pardon of Jan. 6 insurrectionists disrespects the police who fought & died to protect the Capitol,” he wrote on social media.

After the attack on the Capitol, 10 House Republicans voted to impeach Mr. Trump over the assault and seven Republican senators voted to convict him. But one by one, most of them have left Congress as Mr. Trump tightened his grip on the party. Only two of those House members and three senators remain in Congress.

During his first term, Mr. Trump deployed thousands of National Guard troops to the southern border, a move that had some precedent in previous administrations.

But by declaring border security to be a priority for the military as a whole, the president’s directive could put his administration on a collision course with laws intended to prevent presidents from using their power as commander in chief to turn the military against U.S. civilians.

Here’s what to know about the order, and how it could play out.

Trump has ordered the military to seal U.S. borders.

Mr. Trump’s order directs the defense secretary to make border security part of the mission of U.S. Northern Command, sealing U.S. borders and “repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and tracking, and other criminal activities.”

The order gives the defense secretary 30 days to come up with a plan for how to execute the mission. The directive does not specify exactly which branches of the armed forces ought to be deployed to aid in such a mission, leaving those determinations to military leaders.

There are strict limits on how the military can be deployed inside the United States.

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 forbids the use of armed forces for law enforcement purposes on U.S. soil, unless Congress or the Constitution expressly authorizes it.

While the prohibition is seemingly straightforward, some have argued that its limits would not apply if service members were deployed inside the country for military purposes, as opposed to law enforcement ones.

John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general in President George W. Bush’s administration who held expansive views of presidential powers, argued for this standard in a 2001 Justice Department memorandum on using the military to fight terrorism domestically.

Mr. Trump’s declaration that border security is a function of the U.S. military suggests that his administration holds a similar view of the posse comitatus restrictions — and how to sidestep them.

The law’s restrictions also do not apply to the National Guard, so long as the units remain under the command of state governors.

But the Insurrection Act gives presidents broad power.

The main exception to the Posse Comitatus Act is the Insurrection Act. The more than 200-year-old law grants the president power to deploy the military domestically when faced with “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion” that prevent the execution of federal or state laws.

That broad power has been invoked about 30 times in U.S. history, including by President Abraham Lincoln when seven Confederate states seceded, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower to enforce the desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Ark. Most recently, President George H.W. Bush used it in 1992 to send troops into Los Angeles at the request of California’s governor in an effort to quell race riots that followed the police beating of Rodney King.

Mr. Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act during his first term to put down racial justice riots that broke out across the country after the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by white police officers. Mark T. Esper, Mr. Trump’s defense secretary at the time, strongly opposed the idea, as did Gen. Mark A. Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Trump has some other laws at his disposal.

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 lets the president expel foreign nationals of an enemy nation who are 14 or older. While the law has been invoked only during times of war, presidents can use it for “any invasion or predatory incursion.” Mr. Trump has frequently referred to the unlawful flow of migrants and drugs into the United States as an “invasion.”

The president also declared a national emergency on Monday to fund and outfit the military’s involvement in his deportation effort, and augment the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to obtain “complete operational control of the southern border of the United States.” During his first term, Mr. Trump used an emergency declaration to circumvent Congress and redirect funds to pay for the construction of a border wall.

And while U.S. law forbids using service members for law enforcement activities, it doesn’t preclude them from performing support functions for law enforcement, including logistics, machinery, intelligence, maintenance and training.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.

Mr. Trump has denounced the Jan. 6 prosecutions as part of a Democratic witch hunt. In reality, they were initiated and overseen by his handpicked U.S. attorney in Washington and the F.B.I. director. They had the support of many Republicans, including Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who said, “Those who planned and participated in the violence that day should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Mr. Trump’s decision to offer full pardons to nearly all of the almost 1,600 rioters and rally organizers implicated in the breach of the Capitol was expected. Still, it sent a shock wave among current and former prosecutors who believe his release of prisoners, whom he calls “hostages,” undermines the rule of law.

“It’s a gross misuse of the pardon power, and says that Trump is willing to meddle in a process that helped strengthen the rule of law,” said Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama during the Obama administration.

Matthew M. Graves, who stepped down as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia this month after overseeing many of those prosecutions, said he believed the Trump pardons would “prevent the department from prosecuting the hundreds charged with, or wanted for, assaulting law enforcement officers and reduce the sentences of those convicted of such assaults.”

Mr. Graves, who took over the high-profile post in November 2021, said his office had also brought charges of political violence against left-wing activists such as climate protesters and people who engaged in disruptive demonstrations against the war in Gaza.

“The question becomes, will their acts of political violence and destruction also be pardoned and if not, why not?” he asked in an interview on Monday night.

Still, he added, “there is no undoing these prosecutions, and hundreds have already completed their sentences or completed all or most of their periods of probation.”

The shocking attack on the Capitol was the most significant hostile breach of the national legislature since the War of 1812. It threatened to overwhelm the local U.S. attorney’s office, which at the time was ill-equipped to process evidence and witnesses for hundreds of cases involving possible perpetrators from around the country.

To meet the need, the office, then led by Trump appointee Michael R. Sherwin, began to organize an investigation that would soon pull in dozens of prosecutors on loan from around the country. To bring the cases, prosecutors had to devise a new system to collect, store and analyze a monumental volume of cellphone video that became a model for similar platforms now being used to bring war crimes cases.

The announcement of the pardons came amid questions about the fate of the department at a time when Mr. Trump has vowed to punish anyone, including prosecutors or political opponents, involved in the efforts to hold him accountable for his actions in the aftermath of his loss in the 2020 election.

“The scales of justice will be rebalanced,” Mr. Trump said near the start of his Inaugural Address. “The vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end.”

“The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans, that protects their safety and security, and that ensures the appropriate assimilation of refugees,” the executive order reads.

During his first term, Mr. Trump broke down the U.S. refugee apparatus, decimating a system that had bipartisan support and had been largely untouched for years as he slashed the number of refugees admitted to the country.

Here is what to know about the refugee program, and how Mr. Trump is changing it.

Trump has ordered a suspension of refugee admissions.

Mr. Trump’s order suspends refugee resettlement as of next Monday. The order directs top leaders in the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department to issue a report to him every 90 days thereafter to allow him to assess whether the refugee program “would be in the interests of the United States,” according to the order.

Refugees are already the most vetted people admitted to the U.S.

Foreign nationals seeking to resettle as refugees in the United States face a rigorous and extensive screening process that often lasts for years, which includes security and medical vetting; scrutiny of their families and those with whom they have associated; and interviews with American officials overseas.

Under the law, U.S. officials can reject anyone who the government “knows, or has reasonable ground to believe” will or could commit a terrorist act. But they also have discretion to deny individuals based on mere suspicions.

During his first term in office, Mr. Trump put in place even stricter checks for refugees from 11 countries it deemed “high risk.”

The president has broad latitude to dictate how many refugees are admitted.

Presidents have the power to single-handedly determine the number of refugees allowed into the country. Every year, the president, in consultation with Congress, sets a numerical cap for refugee admissions that year.

Since the refugee program began in earnest in 1980, the annual cap has been high, regardless of the party holding the White House. For example, in his final year as president, George W. Bush admitted around 60,000 refugees in 2008 after setting a cap of 80,000.

Trump slashed the refugee program during his first term.

When he first took office in 2017, Mr. Trump initially paused the refugee program. Then, he used the annual cap to sharply cut the number of refugees allowed into the country. By the end of his administration, he proposed capping the number of refugees at 15,000, the lowest number in the more than 40-year history of the program.

The cuts all but destroyed refugee resettlement in the United States. The network of organizations that support refugees when they first enter the country shrank because they had so many fewer people to serve. The number of government officials assigned to the program also slimmed during those years, to 107 from 170.

In 2020, the last year of Mr. Trump’s first term, just over 11,000 refugees were admitted into the United States — a precipitous drop from the more than 80,000 that were admitted in the year before he took office.

Biden rebuilt the refugee system.

President Joseph R. Biden Jr. slowly restored the refugee resettlement operation during his four years in office, hiring more officers and prompting the opening of offices across the country to serve them. Around 150 offices opened as of last year.

By 2024, the United States had allowed more than 100,000 refugees to enter the country, the highest total in three decades.

That number will almost assuredly drop in 2025.

The executive order, first reported by Axios, was the brainchild of John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, according to two Trump administration officials.

It is unclear how many of the 51 people who signed the letter still have active clearances. Former officials said that most of them had allowed their clearances to lapse years ago and that the order was purely performative. But at least some of the former officials have advisory contracts with intelligence agencies or the military. They could lose those contracts without security clearances, according to former officials.

The signees included prominent intelligence leaders, including Leon Panetta and John Brennan, who served as C.I.A. directors in the Obama administration; Mike Hayden, a C.I.A. director in the Bush administration; and James Clapper, a director of national intelligence in the Obama administration. Mr. Trump previously revoked Mr. Brennan’s security clearance in his first administration.

Some had been critics of the first Trump administration and of Mr. Trump’s treatment of the intelligence agencies.

The order accused them of effectively suppressing information the American people needed to know during the election.

“The signatories willfully weaponized the gravitas of the Intelligence Community to manipulate the political process and undermine our democratic institutions,” the order said.

Several signees said Mr. Trump was misreading the letter that was carefully crafted to warn of possible manipulation.

Trump has long resented that both social media companies and the intelligence establishment were quick to suggest that the emails from Mr. Biden’s laptop were disinformation.

After The New York Post wrote about the content of the emails, some social media companies moved to block links to the story. But no evidence has emerged that showed the emails from the laptop had been altered by a foreign government.

When tapping Mr. Ratcliffe for the C.I.A., Mr. Trump used social media to praise him for criticizing the letter from the former intelligence officials. Mr. Ratcliffe highlighted his criticism of the letter in his confirmation process, saying that time had validated his assessments when he was director of national intelligence.

Trump declared earlier today that he would immediately declare Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, but the executive order that the White House just published outlined a longer process of officials making “a recommendation” about doing so within the next two weeks.

The order also instructs Trump’s cabinet to make preparations for him to potentially invoke the Alien Enemies Act. Trump repeatedly promised to use that law to deport suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process.

But Mr. Trump’s order will have little immediate impact on the taxation of multinational companies. The agreement had already run into trouble in the United States — Republicans have long abhorred the international tax deal, and Democrats failed to make the necessary changes to American tax law to bring the United States into compliance with the deal when they controlled Congress.

That failure has left American companies vulnerable to a key enforcement provision in the agreement. Under the deal, American companies could face higher taxes overseas because the United States did not put into place the 15 percent minimum tax. Some jurisdictions, including the European Union, have moved forward with the minimum tax.

The possibility of American companies paying higher taxes to European nations, for example, had enraged Republicans, who threatened to charge retaliatory taxes on countries that enforced the rules. Mr. Trump’s order directs the Treasury secretary and the United States Trade Representative to examine whether any countries are targeting taxes at American companies and prepare economic measures in response.

Mr. Trump’s order could help spur a new round of negotiations over international taxation, which has been an irritant among major economies for years. Those talks would take place as America’s economic partners are navigating Mr. Trump’s threats to dramatically raise tariffs on their exports to the United States.