Vance, whose views have clashed with the pope’s, spends Holy Week in Rome. (2025)

Pinned

The Trump administration asks the justices to reject an A.C.L.U. request to pause deportations.

The deportations remain paused while the justices consider the matter. In emergency applications, the Supreme Court can act at any time.

In his filing, Mr. Sauer called the request by lawyers for the migrants that the justices step in “fatally premature” and argued that they had “improperly skipped over the lower courts.”

He said that the government had provided advance notice to detainees subject to imminent deportation and that they “have had adequate time to file” claims challenging their removal. Mr. Sauer added that the government had agreed it would not deport any detainees with pending claims.

The 17-page court filing came hours after a rare overnight ruling by the justices, who in a one-page, unsigned order had blocked the Trump administration from deporting the migrants.

It was the latest twist in a fast-moving, high-stakes legal battle over the administration’s efforts to deport Venezuelan migrants accused of being members of Tren de Aragua, a violent gang.

On Friday, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union mounted challenges in lower courts to prevent what they claimed was the imminent removal of Venezuelans who were scheduled to be flown out of the country from a detention center in Texas.

The lawyers then filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court, asking it to step in and temporarily block the deportations to protect the detainees as part of a proposed class action. The A.C.L.U. lawyers asked the court to move swiftly, claiming that some of the migrants had been loaded onto buses, presumably to be taken to the airport.

In his filing, Mr. Sauer said the A.C.L.U. had rushed to an appeals court and the Supreme Court without giving lower courts time to consider the case.

“Nonetheless, without waiting for the government to file its opposition brief and after giving the district court just 42 minutes to rule, applicants immediately sought emergency relief in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and then in this court,” he wrote.

In their overnight order, the justices used formal language to request a response from the government. “The solicitor general is invited to file a response to the application before this court as soon as possible,” they wrote.

Mr. Sauer argued that the migrants had been given “adequate” notice of the government’s intent to deport them. He did not directly address claims by the A.C.L.U. that some of the notices were in English only, saying that “a detainee’s language ability or his family’s pre-existing relationship with a lawyer may well be relevant to a court’s determination of the adequacy of a particular notice.”

He also did not directly address the accusations that migrants might have been on buses and heading to the airport. The A.C.L.U. was “speculating” that migrants would be “removed imminently, before their claims can be further tested,” Mr. Sauer wrote.

He also pushed back against the group’s argument that the justices should protect the detainees as part of a proposed class action. The government had argued that the determination of whether a detainee under the Alien Enemies Act was entitled to court relief was “inherently too individualized” to treat them all as a class.

Three Pentagon officials fired in leak inquiry proclaim their innocence.

“Unnamed Pentagon officials have slandered our character with baseless attacks on our way out the door,” the three wrote in a highly unusual joint statement posted on social media.

The three all served in uniform. The social media message noted that two of them — Mr. Caldwell and Mr. Carroll — had served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Caldwell and Mr. Selnick have known Mr. Hegseth, who brought them to the Pentagon, for more than a decade.

“Based on our collective service, we understand the importance of information security and worked every day to protect it,” the fired officials wrote.

They added that they had not been told what they were accused of leaking “or if there was even a real investigation of ‘leaks’ to begin with.”

Mr. Hegseth’s office has been plagued by infighting, dysfunction and occasional screaming matches since he took over in late January, said defense officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal operations.

The three men described their experience over the past week as “unconscionable,” but said that they remained supportive of President Trump’s agenda and hoped to return to his administration.

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Arizona governor vetoes bill that would have supported federal immigration efforts.

In a letter explaining her veto, Governor Hobbs, a Democrat, said, “Arizonans, not Washington, D.C., politicians, must decide what’s best for Arizona.”

“I will continue to work with the federal government on true border security, but we should not force state and local officials to take marching orders from Washington, D.C.,” she added in the letter, addressed to Warren Petersen, the State Senate president.

Mr. Petersen, who sponsored the bill, called the measure “a vital action to help safeguard our communities” after legislators passed it earlier this month. He and other state Republican leaders were not available for comment on the veto on Saturday.

State Republicans had branded the bill as a necessary measure to “uphold the rule of law” against illegal immigration, arguing that anything short of it would be an affront to those who came to the country legally.

But state Democrats argued that the measure could lead to racial profiling and compromised due process rights. The Arizona House Democrats thanked the governor for vetoing the measure in a statement posted on X.

It was not clear whether legislators would try to override the veto. They would need a two-thirds majority.

Governor Hobbs’s veto comes as the Trump administration has ramped up its crackdown on immigration and as states across the country grapple with how, and whether, to cooperate with federal officials.

Because states have the ability to decide whether or not to work with them, there has been a patchwork of bills on this matter that have passed or are working through state legislatures.

In Florida, for instance, state lawmakers passed measures that take a harder stance on immigration, including one that set aside $250 million for local police departments to help federal officials. And in Alabama, the State House passed a bill this week that would empower local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws.

But in Colorado, the State Senate recently approved a bill that would limit local governments’ cooperation with federal officers.

Here’s a timeline of the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act.

At times, the Trump administration has been accused of disregarding judicial orders as it proceeds with its immigration policies and deportation efforts, deepening legal scholars’ concern that the country could be facing a constitutional crisis.

Here is a timeline:

March 14: The Trump administration issued an executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act, but the order was not immediately made public. The proclamation said that the government was targeting the violent Venezuelan street gang Tren de Aragua, which it said was threatening an invasion of the United States. The Alien Enemies Act allows the government to detain and expel immigrants age 14 or older without a court hearing when the United States is invaded or at war. It is the fourth time the law has been invoked in American history.

March 15: Fearing that the Trump administration was preparing to immediately expel Venezuelans in custody without hearings, the A.C.L.U. filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington seeking to block the president from invoking the law. The same day, the administration published the executive order. In a hastily scheduled virtual hearing, a federal judge in Washington, James E. Boasberg, was told by the A.C.L.U. that planes were leaving the United States with Venezuelans. He ordered the government not to deport anyone under the law and to return any planes that had already taken off, “however that’s accomplished.”

March 16: On social media, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, published a video of men being led off a plane in handcuffs and taken into a prison in his country. Mr. Bukele posted an article about Judge Boasberg’s order and wrote, “Oopsie… Too late.” The Trump administration insisted it did not violate Judge Boasberg’s order. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement that federal courts “have no jurisdiction” over the president’s handling of foreign affairs.

March 17: Judge Boasberg grilled a Justice Department lawyer on whether the government had defied his orders. The lawyer, Abhishek Kambli, refused to answer specific questions but maintained that the government had complied. Mr. Kambli suggested that the government was following the judge’s written order, which did not include the demand that any planes already in the air return. “Apparently my oral orders don’t appear to carry much weight,” Judge Boasberg said, appearing frustrated. A New York Times review of flight data found that three planes carrying more than 200 migrants continued to El Salvador and that none landed before the judge’s order. Two were already in flight, and one had not yet left American soil until after the judge’s written order was published online.

March 26: A federal appeals court kept Judge Boasberg’s block on the Alien Enemies Act in place, denying an appeal by the Trump administration. The vote, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was 2 to 1. Judge Karen L. Henderson wrote that the government had not shown a “likelihood of success on the merits.”

March 28: Judge Boasberg extended his block on the Alien Enemies Act for another two weeks.

April 7: The Supreme Court said in an unsigned, three-page order that the Trump administration could continue to deport Venezuelan migrants, for the time being. It imposed constraints on the administration, saying that detainees must receive notice before they are deported and must be allowed to seek a hearing.

April 16: Judge Boasberg, still searching for answers about whether his orders were defied in connection to the deportation flights a month earlier, issued a ruling threatening an extraordinary contempt investigation into the Trump administration.

April 18: The A.C.L.U. filed court papers in federal court in Washington, saying that Venezuelans held at the Bluebonnet Detention Facility in Anson, Texas, had received removal notices. The notices, written in English, did not tell the Venezuelans how to contest their deportation, the filing said. The migrants were put onto buses and told by officers that they would be removed within 24 hours, court papers said. Judge Boasberg held an emergency hearing, but declined to take any action. Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Texas rejected a request for intervention. The A.C.L.U. also filed an emergency petition to the Supreme Court. (Separately, the appeals court that sits above Boasberg issued a temporary order blocking any contempt proceedings for now.)

April 19: At 12:55 a.m., the Supreme Court issued an unsigned order blocking the Trump administration from deporting the Venezuelans held at the Bluebonnet facility “until further order of this court.” Two members of the Supreme Court’s six-justice conservative majority, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., dissented. The Venezuelans were returned to the Bluebonnet facility, according to the A.C.L.U. The speed at which the typically methodical Supreme Court responded — and the timing of the order’s release in the middle of the night — were highly unusual.

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Urgency of Supreme Court order suggests a skepticism of the Trump administration.

The court’s unsigned, one-paragraph order was extraordinary in many ways. Perhaps most important, it indicated a deep skepticism about whether the administration could be trusted to live up to the key part of an earlier ruling after the government had deported a different group of migrants to a prison in El Salvador.

That unsigned and apparently unanimous ruling, issued April 7, said that detainees were entitled to be notified if the government intended to deport them under the law, “within a reasonable time,” and in a way that would allow the deportees to challenge the move in court before their removal.

There were indications late Friday that the administration was poised to violate both the spirit and letter of that ruling. Lawyers for the detainees said their clients were given notices that they were eligible to be deported under the law, the Alien Enemies Act. The notices were written in English, a language many of them do not speak, the lawyers said. And they provided no realistic opportunity to go to court.

The American Civil Liberties Union, racing against the clock, filed its emergency application to the Supreme Court on Friday evening — Good Friday, as it happened — and urged the court to take immediate action to protect the detainees as part of a proposed class action.

The lawyers told the court that they feared their clients could be deported within hours, saying that some had already been loaded onto buses, presumably to be taken to the airport.

The Supreme Court did act fast. “The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court,” the order said.

In a typical case, the Supreme Court would await a ruling from the relevant appeals court, here the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and ask for a response from the administration, on a deadline set by the justices.

The justices did neither of those things. Instead, their unsigned opinion said: “The matter is currently pending before the Fifth Circuit. Upon action by the Fifth Circuit, the solicitor general is invited to file a response to the application before this court as soon as possible.”

Inviting rather than ordering the government to respond is standard language. But asking for a response “as soon as possible” is not an instruction longtime observers of the court recognized. It was not tortoise talk.

On Saturday, Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the Supreme Court to allow lower courts to weigh in and to develop “a proper factual record” before intervening in the case.

The Fifth Circuit issued its ruling in the small hours of Saturday morning, denying the A.C.L.U.’s request for emergency relief as premature.

It would not have been unusual for a single justice to issue an “administrative stay”— a brief pause — to let the court consider the matter in a more deliberate fashion. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has issued such stays in recent weeks, as a flood of emergency applications related to early moves by the Trump administration have come before the court.

But each of the nation’s 13 federal circuits is supervised by an assigned justice, and the member of the court responsible for overseeing the Fifth Circuit is Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. He was apparently not inclined to issue a stay on his own. Indeed, the Saturday order noted that both he and Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.

The court’s order said that Justice Alito would explain his reasoning at some point. That, too, is unusual, as dissenting justices are generally afforded time to issue their opinions along with that of the majority.

The days to come are likely to be busy ones at the court, which is yet to address the substantial legal questions in the case, including whether the wartime law applies at all, and what the detainees must show to overcome accusations that they are gang members.

For now, the justices have tried to ensure that those questions can be addressed by federal courts while the people affected are still in the United States.

Protesters nationwide rallied again to condemn Trump’s policies.

The participants raged against the president, who they say is trampling on civil liberties and the rule of law, and overreaching in immigration, federal job cuts, the economy and other areas.

In front of the White House, protesters repeatedly shouted a single word.

“Shame!”

Thousands more marched from the Washington Monument. Many demonstrators berated the administration for not bringing Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who the courts have said was wrongfully deported to El Salvador, back to the United States. Waving upside-down American flags, they marched along the eight-lane Constitution Avenue, chanting “Bring Kilmar home.” Trump officials have maintained that Mr. Abrego Garcia was a member of the Salvadoran gang MS-13; he denies the claim.

Julia Fine, a Maryland resident who was holding a sign at the protest by the White House that read “free Garcia,” said the prison in El Salvador where Mr. Abrego Garcia is being held reminded her of “concentration camps.”

“That’s where we’re headed with this,” she said.

Concerns over the government’s handling of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case echoed at demonstrations from New York City to Cincinnati to Chicago.

At the protest in Manhattan, hundreds of signs flew in the air, including one that read: “Due Process.”

“It’s an injustice,” said Barry Knittle, 64, a manager at an engineering firm who lives in Mt. Kisco, N.Y. “And I fear it’s just the beginning.”

The crowd chanted, “The people united will never be defeated.” Packed double-decker tour buses passing by honked their horns in support, drawing big cheers.

Although many of the events on Saturday were traditional protests, many also were intended to unite local communities through activities such as food drives. Mass protests during President Trump’s first term, like the Women’s March in 2017, often focused on a single topic, but demonstrators on Saturday expressed concern on a wide range of issues: federal job cuts, their 401(k)s, veterans’ rights, Social Security, the war in Ukraine, transgender and gay rights, and misinformation on autism and vaccines.

“Everything here is a big issue,” said Fio Holloman, 22, who attended a rally in Chicago’s Daley Plaza.

Hundreds of protesters rallied in Fort Worth, at one point shutting down traffic for at least four blocks. Jeannie Walker, 54, couldn’t land on just one issue when asked what brought her to Saturday’s protest.

“All of it,” she said.

Aaron Burk, who attended the Washington rally and whose girlfriend took a federal buyout from the Department of Energy, said he was worried that the administration would not stop at deporting undocumented immigrants without due process and would imprison and deport U.S. citizens.

“Where does it stop?” he said. Mr. Burk added that his daughter is transgender and that he was most concerned about the dehumanization of minorities.

Hundreds took to the streets in Jacksonville, Fla., to protest a number of causes, including the president’s attacks on the L.B.G.T.Q. community and the government’s desire to alter the Endangered Species Act.

“We are losing our country,” said one demonstrator, Sara Harvey, 65. In the last few months, she said she had protested the federal job cuts led by Elon Musk and joined the nationwide protests on April 5.

“I’m worried for my grandchildren,” she said. “I do it for them.”

In Cincinnati, thousands of people marched peacefully through downtown. Aftab Pureval, the mayor, led the crowd in a chant of “vote them out” and denounced the Trump administration for cutting federal workers, imposing tariffs and mismanaging the economy, saying that everything that working families need will become more expensive.

For some who attended, like Andrea Mallory, 35, a social worker, the event was akin to a group therapy session.

“This is good for us emotionally,” she said.

A celebration in Concord, Mass., to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution was not part of the organized network of protests, but some people took the occasion to draw parallels between then and now.

Conan Walter, 65, stood on the Old North Bridge holding a large poster scrawled with the words “Stop fascism now.”

“This celebration is about us getting out from under the King of England’s authoritarian rule,” Mr. Walter said. “That rule is trying to make a comeback today, and it’s important that people step up against that and meet the challenge.”

Still, not everyone in Concord was there to protest on Saturday. Deborah Bucknam, 78, an avid Trump supporter and lawyer from northern Vermont, said she felt shut out of the political conversation on Saturday morning. Ms. Bucknam came to Concord to honor American history, and she said political differences shouldn’t overshadow the milestone.

But she acknowledged that demonstrators were allowed to voice their dissent.

“Protests are part of the American experience,” she said. “We have a right to protest, but everyone has a right to protest.”

Robert Chiarito contributed reporting from Chicago; Lila Hempel-Edgers from Concord, Mass.; Mary Beth Gahan from Fort Worth; Nichole Manna from Jacksonville, Fla.; Nate Schweber from New York; and Kevin Williams from Cincinnati.

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Supreme Court orders in the middle of the night are rare these days.

A third was issued around midnight in 2021, a day after the court allowed a restrictive Texas abortion law to go into effect, signaling that Roe v. Wade was in peril.

Those late-night rulings, on what critics call the court’s “shadow docket,” could convey the sense that the justices were hiding something, engaged in palace intrigue or simply not able to manage their work. In apparent response to such criticism, the justices have in recent years tried to issue orders on emergency matters during business hours.

Indeed, when the court last month rejected President Trump’s emergency request to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid, it released its order first thing in the morning, which is also unusual.

The court’s latest order, blocking the administration from deporting a group of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members under a rarely invoked wartime law, was issued at 12:55 a.m. on Saturday morning. Whatever calculations the justices had made in earlier cases, it seemed plain that they viewed this one as a true emergency.

Vance, whose views have clashed with the pope’s, spends Holy Week in Rome.

No meeting was announced with Pope Francis, who recently left the hospital after spending five weeks there in serious condition and has since made few public appearances.

Mr. Vance’s Catholic faith permeates his socially conservative politics. But since he took office, some of the Trump administration’s policies have drawn condemnation from the pope.

Francis has strongly criticized the Trump administration’s policy of mass deportations and has urged Roman Catholics to reject anti-immigrant sentiments. Mr. Vance has strongly defended that policy, pointing to the medieval Catholic theological concept of “ordo amoris,” the idea of a hierarchy of duties that prioritizes immediate obligations to one’s family or community over more distant needs.

“You love your family, then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” Mr. Vance said in an interview with Fox News in January. “A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”

The pope seemed to be alluding to Mr. Vance’s argument in a letter he wrote in February to American bishops in which he spoke out against Trump’s policy on migrants.

In the letter, Francis said, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.”

“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted,” Francis wrote, is “love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

Mr. Vance acknowledged the pope’s critical comments, but said he would continue to express his views.

“I was certainly surprised when he criticized our immigration policy in the way that he has,” Mr. Vance said at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in February. He added that the news media, along with social media influencers and even some Catholics, “try to bring the Holy Father into every culture war battle in American politics.”

Still, Mr. Vance said that the pope “cares about the flock of Christians” and that he was praying for him.

During Mr. Vance’s meeting on Saturday with Cardinal Parolin and with Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s foreign minister, the officials exchanged opinions on “difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners,” along with other issues, according to a statement from the Vatican.

On Friday, Mr. Vance stood, sat and knelt for two hours in St. Peter’s Basilica, his young daughter sleeping in his arms at one point, as he followed the Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion, during which the faithful are invited to fix their eyes on a statue of the crucified Jesus. Cardinals and bishops proceeded in a line, bent and kissed the statue’s feet.

Kimberlee Woo-leng, 24, a student from Trinidad and Tobago who also attended the service, said she hoped spending Holy Week in Rome would help Mr. Vance “have mercy.”

“I hope it strikes his heart,” she said.

Elizabeth Dias contributed reporting.

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Prominent Republicans signed an open letter likening Trump’s actions to those of a ‘royal despot.’

Earlier this month, Mr. Trump issued two executive orders revoking the security clearances of Chris Krebs, who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under during Mr. Trump’s first term and rebutted his claims that the 2020 election had been rigged and stolen, and Miles Taylor, who once served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Taylor anonymously wrote a New York Times opinion essay in 2018 accusing Mr. Trump of rampant “amorality” and telling of an internal government “resistance.”

Mr. Trump’s executive orders also revoked the security clearances of people and institutions affiliated with Mr. Krebs and Mr. Taylor, and called for investigations into their government tenures. The letter, signed by more than 200 people, criticized those actions as part of a “profoundly unconstitutional break” with precedent.

“Behavior of this kind is more to be expected from a royal despot than the elected leader of a constitutional republic,” the signers wrote. “This is the path of autocracy, not democracy.”

The letter’s signatories include Ty Cobb, a lawyer who led Mr. Trump’s response to a special counsel’s investigation of his ties to Russia during its early phases, and John Mitnick, who served as general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security until he was fired in 2019 after clashing with the White House.

Mr. Cobb and Mr. Mitnick, like many of the other Republicans on the list of signatories, have been openly critical of Mr. Trump since parting ways with his administration.

The letter was spearheaded by the State Democracy Defenders Fund, a group run by Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served on the staff of the first team of House Democrats that worked to impeach Mr. Trump in 2019.

The Brookings Institution is not involved in the fund, nor was it involved in the letter.

A lawsuit aims to broadly halt deportations of foreign students.

Cases of international students being detained by masked immigration agents over violations cited by the Trump administration that many individual rights groups have described as protected speech have sparked widespread outrage. But most have been challenged in individual lawsuits.

The lawsuit filed in New Hampshire casts a wider net, intending to to stop similar detentions and deportation efforts for students in New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico. It also asks the court to reinstate the student visas that have been terminated.

In recent weeks, immigration agencies have rapidly stepped up efforts to punish international students studying in the United States, in many cases because of their involvement in pro-Palestinian protests related to the war in Gaza. In some instances, the lawyers of detained students have described the use of aggressive tactics and students being moved hundreds of miles to detention facilities in Louisiana.

Hundreds of students have been swept up in the deportation campaign. Among those whose cases have drawn national attention are Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University; Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident of the United States who studied at Columbia University; and Momodou Taal, a British-Gambian Ph.D. student at Cornell University. Their cases have also prompted pushback from legal groups over what they say is a threat to campus speech.

The new lawsuit challenges those arrests as an arbitrary overreach by immigration officials and a violation of students’ due process rights.

In moving to deport the students, the Trump administration has used charged rhetoric. In several cases it has argued that by expressing support for pro-Palestinian demonstrations — sometimes only indirectly — the students’ presence in the United States amounted to a national security threat. Officials have routinely referred to student visas as a privilege that can be revoked at any time and have characterized the students as supporters of “pro-jihadist protests” and terrorism.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of five students from China and India. It did not specify what rationale was given for their visas being terminated.

“These terminations — across the board — flout the applicable regulations governing student status termination and the regulations governing failure to maintain student status,” it said.

The lawsuit lists an array of harms facing students studying on a visa, including imminent detention and deportation, and loss of their progress toward a degree or graduate research. It noted that as of a week ago, the four states involved and Puerto Rico have collectively seen at least 112 people whose student statuses were terminated.

It asked a federal judge to issue a ruling to block the Trump administration from carrying out future detentions and deportations of any student across the nearly 200 accredited colleges and universities in the states involved.

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Trump officials blame a mistake for setting off a confrontation with Harvard.

The April 11 letter from the White House’s task force on antisemitism, this official told Harvard, should not have been sent and was “unauthorized,” two people familiar with the matter said.

The letter was sent by the acting general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, Sean Keveney, according to three other people, who were briefed on the matter. Mr. Keveney is a member of the antisemitism task force.

It is unclear what prompted the letter to be sent last Friday. Its content was authentic, the three people said, but there were differing accounts inside the administration of how it had been mishandled. Some people at the White House believed it had been sent prematurely, according to the three people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions. Others in the administration thought it had been meant to be circulated among the task force members rather than sent to Harvard.

But its timing was consequential. The letter arrived when Harvard officials believed they could still avert a confrontation with President Trump. Over the previous two weeks, Harvard and the task force had engaged in a dialogue. But the letter’s demands were so extreme that Harvard concluded that a deal would ultimately be impossible.

After Harvard publicly repudiated the demands, the Trump administration raised the pressure, freezing billions in federal funding to the school and warning that its tax-exempt status was in jeopardy.

A senior White House official said the administration stood by the letter, calling the university’s decision to publicly rebuff the administration overblown and blaming Harvard for not continuing discussions.

“It was malpractice on the side of Harvard’s lawyers not to pick up the phone and call the members of the antisemitism task force who they had been talking to for weeks,” said May Mailman, the White House senior policy strategist. “Instead, Harvard went on a victimhood campaign.”

Still, Ms. Mailman said, there is a potential pathway to resume discussions if the university, among other measures, follows through on what Mr. Trump wants and apologizes to its students for fostering a campus where there was antisemitism.

Mr. Keveney could not be reached for comment. In a statement, a spokesman for the antisemitism task force said, “The task force, and the entire Trump administration, is in lock step on ensuring that entities who receive taxpayer dollars are following all civil rights laws.”

Harvard pushed back on the White House’s claim that it should have checked with the administration lawyers after receiving the letter.

The letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised,” Harvard said in a statement on Friday. “Recipients of such correspondence from the U.S. government — even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach — do not question its authenticity or seriousness.”

The statement added: “It remains unclear to us exactly what, among the government’s recent words and deeds, were mistakes or what the government actually meant to do and say. But even if the letter was a mistake, the actions the government took this week have real-life consequences” on students and employees and “the standing of American higher education in the world.”

The letter shocked Harvard not only because of the nature of the demands but because it was sent when the university’s leadership and the lawyers it hired to deal with the administration thought they could head off a full-bore conflict with Mr. Trump.

For two weeks, Harvard’s lawyers, William Burck and Robert Hur, listened as Trump officials, in fairly broad strokes, laid out the administration’s concerns about how the school dealt with antisemitism and other issues.

On the administration’s side of this dialogue were three lawyers: Josh Gruenbaum, a top official at the General Services Administration; Thomas Wheeler, the acting general counsel for the Department of Education; and Mr. Keveney.

The back and forth lacked specifics on what the administration wanted Harvard to do. The Trump administration lawyers said they would send Harvard a letter last Friday that laid out more specifics.

By the end of the workday on Friday, the letter had not arrived. Instead, overnight, the lawyers from Harvard received a letter, sent from Mr. Keveney in an email, that was far different from the one the school had expected.

It listed a series of demands that would reshape student and academic life in ways Harvard could never agree to. On Monday, Harvard said publicly that it could not accede to them.

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Gruenbaum called one of Harvard’s lawyers, according to two people with knowledge of the calls. At first he said he and Mr. Wheeler had not authorized the sending of the letter. Mr. Gruenbaum then slightly changed his story, saying the letter was supposed to be sent at some point, just not on Friday when the dialogue between the two sides was still constructive, one of the people said.

A lawyer for Columbia University received a similar call from Mr. Gruenbaum around the same time, two people with knowledge of the call said. He, Mr. Wheeler and Mr. Keveney had also been engaged with Columbia about changes the task force wanted that university to adopt, and Mr. Gruenbaum wanted the Columbia lawyer to know that the letter to Harvard was “unauthorized,” the two people with knowledge of the call said.

Mr. Gruenbaum did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Later Monday, Harvard’s corporation and senior leaders were briefed on Mr. Gruenbaum’s assertion that the letter should not have been sent. The briefing left many on Harvard’s side convinced that the letter had been a mistake, three people familiar with the matter said.

Harvard officials, including several who worked in government earlier in their careers, were shocked that such an important letter — bearing the logos of three government agencies, with signatures of three top officials at the bottom — could be sent by a mistake.

But at that point, there was no way for Harvard to undo what had already been set in motion. The university had already declared that it would rebuff the letter’s demands. And despite claiming that the letter should not have been sent, the Trump administration did not withdraw it.

In response to Harvard’s decision to fight, the White House announced that Mr. Trump was freezing $2.2 billion in grants to the school. Within a day, he was threatening to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status.

Maureen Farrell contributed reporting.