Stocks fell in response to the potential tariffs, with declines in the industrial sector outpacing the overall market. The Standard Poor’s 500 industrial sector was down 1.9 percent, compared with a decline of about 1.3 percent in the overall benchmark index. Shares of American automakers, all large consumers of steel and aluminum, declined, as did shares of Boeing, a large exporter that could be hurt if other nations retaliate against United States tariffs.
Mr. Trump’s announcement came despite months of heavy pushback from American companies that use metals in their products, like automakers and food packagers, and foreign officials, who warned that tariffs would strain relations and could prompt retaliatory trade actions. It also elicited a swift and severe response from Republican lawmakers, who said the action would ultimately hurt American companies, workers, consumers and the economy.
The announcement capped a frenetic and chaotic morning as Mr. Trump summoned more than a dozen executives from the steel and aluminum industry to the White House, raising expectations that he would announce his long-promised tariffs.
Mr. Trump raised the specter of action with an early morning Twitter post, saying: “Our Steel and Aluminum industries (and many others) have been decimated by decades of unfair trade and bad policy with countries from around the world. We must not let our country, companies and workers be taken advantage of any longer.”
Yet the legal review of the trade measure had not been completed and, as of Thursday morning, White House advisers were still discussing various outcomes for tariff levels and which countries could be included, according to people familiar with the deliberations. Just an hour before Mr. Trump made his remarks, a White House spokeswoman said that no announcement was expected that morning.
Advisers have been bitterly divided over how to proceed on the tariffs, including whether to impose them broadly on all steel and aluminum imports, which would ensnare allies like the European Union and Canada, or whether to tailor them more narrowly to target specific countries.
Imposing tough sanctions would fulfill the president’s promises but could tip off trade wars around the world as other countries seek to retaliate against the United States. Foreign governments, multinational companies and the Pentagon have continued to push against broad tariffs, arguing that the measures could disrupt economic and security ties.
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Brazil, Canada, Germany, Mexico and South Korea were the largest suppliers of steel to the United States in 2017, while Canada, Russia and the United Arab Emirates shipped the largest share of aluminum imports in 2016.
On Thursday, Canada, the European Union and other countries said they might have no choice but to retaliate in response.
The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, called the measure “blatant intervention to protect U.S. domestic industry” and said the European Union had been a close security ally of the United States for decades.
“We will not sit idly while our industry is hit with unfair measures that put thousands of European jobs at risk,” Mr. Juncker said.
Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian minister of foreign affairs, called any measure that deemed Canadian trade a national security threat “entirely inappropriate.”
“Should restrictions be imposed on Canadian steel and aluminum products, Canada will take responsive measures to defend its trade interests and workers,” she said.
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That is the exact situation Mr. Trump’s pro-trade advisers have long feared and worked to prevent. Gary D. Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, had been lobbying for months alongside others, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Rob Porter, the staff secretary who recently resigned under pressure from the White House, to kill, postpone or at least narrow the scope of the measures, people familiar with the discussions said.
But in recent weeks, a group of White House advisers who advocate a tougher posture on trade has been in ascendance, including Robert E. Lighthizer, the country’s top trade negotiator and a former steel industry lawyer; Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary who led the metals investigation; and Peter Navarro, a trade skeptic who had been sidelined but is now in line for a promotion.
Mr. Cohn threatened to resign if the White House followed through with stiff and sweeping tariffs, according to people who have spoken with him in recent days.
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The departure of Mr. Porter, who organized weekly trade policy meetings and coordinated the trade advisers, has helped fuel a chaotic situation that has descended into an all-out war among various trade advisers, people close to the White House said.
The White House has been on the brink of announcing steel and aluminum tariffs several times in the past eight months, including in June. In recent days, the president appears to have grown impatient for action.
Supporters of the tariffs have begun broadcasting televised ads in recent days during programs that Mr. Trump has been known to watch. One such ad ran on Fox News minutes before the president’s Twitter post on Thursday morning.
But the tariffs have divided industries, workers and policymakers. American manufacturers of steel and aluminum pressed the White House to take action against cheap imports, which they say hurt their ability to compete. Companies that use steel and aluminum in their products say tariffs would raise their costs, eating into profits or forcing them to raise prices or lay off workers.
Scott N. Paul, the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, which represents steel companies and workers, said the president made “an encouraging show of support” on Thursday morning but now needed to act.
“The president’s enforcement action must be broad, robust and comprehensive,” Mr. Paul said.
Republican lawmakers blasted the announcement, underlining how far Mr. Trump has strayed from the party’s traditional orthodoxy of embracing free and open markets. Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, called tariffs “a tax hike the American people don’t need and can’t afford.”
“Let’s be clear: The president is proposing a massive tax increase on American families,” said Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska. “You’d expect a policy this bad from a leftist administration, not a supposedly Republican one.”
But Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, defended the president, calling the announcement a “long overdue” action for steelworkers in his state.
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The prospect of tariffs seemed likely to incite a period of fierce lobbying by foreign governments and multinational companies who will argue that their products should be exempted from any sanctions. It could also result in protracted fight at the World Trade Organization.
The World Trade Organization provides substantial leeway for countries to pursue trade measures in their national security interest, but few countries have tested those permissions.
Jennifer A. Hillman, a professor at Georgetown Law, said she expected countries to bring challenges and that the outcome could be negative, whether the United States wins or loses.
A ruling against the United States might feed an opinion already popular in the Trump administration that global trade rules compromise American sovereignty, and provide a reason to potentially withdraw from the organization.
Even a ruling in Washington’s favor could prompt others to follow the United States in using national security concerns to justify a vast array of measures to shut off their own markets from American products.
“Arguably every other country in the world can do the same thing,” Ms. Hillman said. “You’ve really now walked away from a rules-based trading system.”
Image Federal agents recently arrested an undocumented immigrant from Ivory Coast as he left Bronx Criminal Court, part of stepped-up enforcement by the Trump administration.CreditVictor J. Blue for The New York Times
From the early days of the Trump administration, Mayor Bill de Blasio proclaimed that he would defend the residents of New York from the newly aggressive immigration authorities, “regardless of where they come from, regardless of their immigration status.”
A year later, the federal government has ratcheted up its attacks against so-called sanctuary cities like New York — including Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco — threatening to withhold millions of dollars in federal funding for law enforcement programs and detaining growing numbers of undocumented residents. Cities faced a Friday deadline to prove their cooperation with the immigration authorities, as the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, continued making arrests. Nationwide, the number of arrests in 2017 increased 41 percent from the year before.
In New York, where some 500,000 residents are undocumented, if ICE wants to arrest somebody, it can.
“Putting a bubble over a city where ICE can’t penetrate is not possible,” said Camille Mackler, the legal policy director of the New York Immigration Coalition, an activist group. “People think ‘sanctuary city’ — that you’re able to walk freely without fear. That’s not the case.”
ICE agents have been appearing in New York’s courthouses and at people’s front doors, and, according to immigrant advocates, even entered a Manhattan church with a Spanish-speaking immigrant congregation. While the New York Police Department does not generally hand over detainees to ICE, it does, through a bureaucratic backdoor, essentially provide a road map: Arrest information is sent to the state, which shares it with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. ICE can now see that information.
“It’s hardly a sanctuary,” said Muzaffar Chishti, the director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York University School of Law. “The mayor of the City of New York does not hide people under his desk. We’re fully cooperating with ICE. People get deported from New York all the time.”
Immigration arrests of residents without criminal records more than tripled in New York after President Trump took office. Of the 2,976 arrests in 2017, 899 were of people without criminal convictions, up from 250 out of 1,762 in 2016, according to ICE statistics. Under the Obama administration, undocumented immigrants without criminal records were not priorities for deportation.
Mr. de Blasio often says that the term “sanctuary city” is misinterpreted: It is a policy intended to make undocumented victims or witnesses feel safe to report crimes to the police without fear of immigration repercussions.
Image The Iglesia de Sion at Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Midtown Manhattan has a predominantly Hispanic congregation. A pastor there said immigration agents showed up in the lobby of the church, and he escorted them out.CreditVictor J. Blue for The New York Times
To that end, New York does not deputize police officers to carry out immigration laws, under a policy known as 287g, which Mr. Trump has strongly supported. Since 2014, the city has declined to honor what are known as detainers — requests by ICE to hold undocumented immigrants who have been charged or convicted of crimes for 48 hours past their release dates so that immigration agents can pick them up. The city also removed immigration authorities from the Rikers Island jail complex where they had easy access to prisoners when they were released.
“It forces them to go to inconvenient and costly routes to get to their target,” Mr. Chishti said.
New York’s detainer law, however, has exceptions: The police must turn over a person convicted of one of 170 serious crimes within the last five years — including arson, homicide, rape or robbery — and in cases in which a judge has signed a detainer request.
ICE issued 1,526 detainer requests to the New York Police Department in the 2017 fiscal year, up from 80 in 2016. The Police Department complied with none of them.
By its own policy, ICE does not enter places of worship, schools and hospitals. But courthouses have become frequent sites of arrests because they offer a degree of control that agents would not have when going to people’s homes.
“Because courthouse visitors are typically screened upon entry to search for weapons and other contraband, the safety risks for the arresting officers and for the arrestee inside such a facility are substantially diminished,” ICE said in a statement.
According to the Immigrant Defense Project, a nonprofit organization that is tracking arrests at city and state courthouses, 87 arrests were made in New York City courts in 2017, compared with six in 2016. So far, this year, there have been 13 courthouse arrests.
Aboubacar Dembele, 27, was one. He was surrounded by immigration agents moments after stepping out of a hearing in Bronx Criminal Court. Mr. Dembele, an undocumented immigrant from the Ivory Coast, had pleaded not guilty to an assault charge stemming from a fight on a city bus in December; the judge had reduced the charge to a misdemeanor from a felony, and had set a follow-up court date to address the charges.
Instead, Mr. Dembele is awaiting deportation at the Hudson County Correctional Facility in Kearny, N.J.
“The way that they come and ambush people is outrageous,” said his lawyer, Monica Dula, of the Legal Aid Society of New York.
Parishioner Julia Nielsen, 76, attended a Spanish-language worship service at Iglesia de Sion, where some worshipers said they believed the city could shield them, even though its powers are limited.CreditVictor J. Blue for The New York Times
Mr. Dembele was placed on ICE’s radar because of his arrest; his court appearance was public record.
In January, ICE clarified its policy to say that it would not arrest family members or witnesses. Actions inside courthouses, it said, would be against “targeted aliens with criminal convictions, gang members, national security or public safety threats.”
“The public is led to believe that ICE is pulling out dangerous individuals,” the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, said at a news conference to denounce ICE’s courthouse actions. He added that low-level offenders are more often being arrested. “There is a chilling effect on our noncitizen and immigrant populations.”
As he spoke, ICE agents were in a Brooklyn courthouse to pick up a defendant. The judge postponed the case when the man’s lawyer, Roger Asmar, told her that his client was afraid to appear.
Mr. Gonzalez has instructed prosecutors to bring lesser charges against immigrants accused of low-level offenses so as not to trigger deportations or affect their immigration applications, and the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., has declined to prosecute most people arrested for evading the fare on the subways.
Mr. de Blasio has come out against that idea, however, for public-safety reasons.
The city, which has provided a municipal ID card often used by undocumented residents, has also allocated $47.5 million for immigrant legal services this year.
To the ire of some immigrant activists, Mr. de Blasio said the money could not be used to aid undocumented immigrants convicted of the serious crimes defined by the detainer law. The New York City Bar Association wrote him a letter claiming “it was fundamentally unfair” to deny people legal help, including those eligible for a complex form of relief for victims of domestic violence or unaccompanied minors.
Last summer, Mr. de Blasio eliminated city money for that same class of immigrants in deportation proceedings. The City Council secured private funding to keep representing clients who fell into this category.
At times, it seems that Mr. de Blasio’s fierce rhetoric has given some immigrants an inflated sense of security. In December, two ICE officers entered the downstairs lobby of Saint Peter’s Church in Midtown Manhattan that houses a Spanish-speaking congregation, La Iglesia de Sion, according to the Rev. Amandus J. Derr, a pastor at Saint Peter’s. Father Derr escorted the two men from the building. An official for ICE said it could not confirm that the officers were from the enforcement agency.
The incident left the congregation rattled and its numbers depleted. One member attending a recent Sunday Mass, Angela Carvajal, 49, relayed her fears. “I hope the mayor will do something about this,” she said in Spanish. Her friend, Alicia Garcia-Fuentes, 40, added, “Isn’t he supposed to protect the undocumented?”
