Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, disputed several recent claims made by the Trump administration related to the war in Ukraine. In March, President Trump vowed to seek the return of thousands of Ukrainian children who have been sent to Russia since the invasion began, but in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Lavrov said that Trump had not made any request related to their release. Lavrov also said Russia had not received any proposal from the United States on shared control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, after Trump said last month he would discuss control of the plant and potential division of power grid assets with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House minority leader, and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey have been leading Democrats in a sit-in style demonstration on the steps of the Capitol that is focused in part on the impending budget fight. Congress this week is set to begin hammering out spending limits for the next fiscal year, but that process will most likely proceed with little to no input from Democrats, who are in the minority of both chambers. The demonstration, which began at sunrise with a rotating cast of lawmakers, comes just under a month after Booker’s marathon floor speech condemning the Trump administration, as Democrats seek to stoke public opposition to Republican policies.

Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who for weeks has been drawing sizeable crowds across the country at event centered around an anti-Trump message, said Democrats aren’t currently offering “a vision for the future.” In an interview on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Sanders said he was aligned with Democratic colleagues who are irate at the policies coming from the White House, but said there was not a clear plan on what to do in response. Part of the aim of his tour with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, is recruiting a new generation of politicians that will fight for working class issues, he said. “We’re going out around the country right now asking people, working people, run for office,” he said.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made clear that the Trump administration is looking to strike short-term agreements in principle — rather than detailed trade deals — to de-escalate trade tensions and lower tariffs with China and other countries. “I think there is a path here,” Bessent said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Responding to recent criticism from voters and elected officials within his own party, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the Senate minority leader, said he believes that Democrats on Capitol Hill have homed in on an effective messaging strategy to push back against President Trump and that members of his caucus are “united and focused and strong.” In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Schumer said that Democrats are focused on highlighting the belief that Trump’s policies will place additional economic strain on the middle class. “I think we are on our front foot,” Schumer said.

In an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described President Trump’s approach to tariffs as “strategic uncertainty” to establish leverage over foreign nations. He gave no specifics when host Martha Raddatz asked him about Trump’s recent claim that he’s already struck 200 trade deals, given none have been announced. Raddatz also pressed Bessent on Trump’s claim that he had spoken to President Xi Jinping of China on the trade negotiations. The Chinese have denied that any negotiations have taken place. Presumably, the treasury secretary would be aware of such a conversation, but Bessent replied: “I don’t know if President Trump has spoken with President Xi. I know they have a very good relationship and a lot of respect for each other.”

Usually, the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner features Hollywood stars, a zinger-filled comedy set and a public display of comity between the White House and the press corps that covers it.

On Saturday, the dinner had no comedian and no president. Among the smattering of celebrities on hand was Michael Chiklis, whose best-known television role, in “The Shield,” concluded in 2008.

“It’s just us,” Eugene Daniels, the association’s president and an MSNBC host, told his fellow journalists at the start of the night.

The reporters who spoke from the dais emphasized the importance of the First Amendment, garnering repeated ovations from the black-tie crowd. Levity came in the form of clips from past years, when presidents still turned up and cracked wise about the press and themselves.

Hand-wringing about the dinner, once the apex of the capital’s social calendar, is as much a Washington tradition as the corporate-sponsored parties that surround it. But as media institutions grapple with an onslaught from President Trump — who has sued and threatened television networks, barred The Associated Press from presidential events and upended the day-to-day workings of the White House press corps — the notion of a booze-soaked celebration felt particularly jarring.

“The mood and reality sucks,” said Jim VandeHei, the journalist and news executive who helped create Politico and then Axios, two stalwarts of the Beltway media.

“No president attending, no comedian to make fun of all of us, TV networks buckling under government pressure, a top producer quitting over corporate interference and the public sour on the media and government,” Mr. VandeHei said. “Enjoy the weekend!”

It is true that, in the last several days alone, the head of “60 Minutes” resigned as CBS’s owner considered a multimillion-dollar payment to settle a lawsuit brought by President Trump, and the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit that aids reporters living under autocrats, issued a safety advisory for journalists planning to visit the United States. And on Friday afternoon, hours before the first wave of weekend parties, the Justice Department announced that it would subpoena reporters’ phone records and compel their testimony in leak investigations.

Maybe journalists could use a moment or two to relax.

“Our clients work so hard covering today’s nonstop news cycle, and once a year we throw a big weekend of parties to honor them for their work,” said Rachel Adler, the head of news at Creative Artists Agency, who represents television journalists like Andrea Mitchell and Audie Cornish and was the co-host of a jampacked soiree on Friday at a private Georgetown club. “Why would this year be any different?”

Tammy Haddad, a Washington impresario whose annual Saturday garden party went ahead unabated and well-attended, said that for all the tensions over press access and independence, the weekend was still a chance for community. “Some chose to stay away, but there are opportunities to make new connections and find some common ground,” she said. (Her guests included the editor Tina Brown, the chef Bobby Flay and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor recently sworn in to lead Medicare and Medicaid.)

Still, the correspondents’ dinner itself carried a more serious tenor than in years past. Some of the loudest applause came for journalists at The A.P., which has been embroiled in a legal fight with the administration after Mr. Trump sought to restrict access to its reporters for using the term “Gulf of Mexico” in its coverage.

Mr. Daniels pledged support to The A.P. and also to Voice of America, another outlet that has been the target of Mr. Trump’s scorn. With no entertainer for the evening, Mr. Daniels served as the keynote speaker, calling for journalistic solidarity.

“What we are not is the opposition,” he said. “What we are not is the enemy of the people. And what we are not is the enemy of the state.” He called journalists “competitive and pushy,” but also “human,” noting the effort that reporters make to ensure accurate information reaches the public.

In interviews, top journalists at multiple news outlets said that it had been nearly impossible to convince celebrities and lawmakers to attend as guests. One reporter said that the list of people who had rejected invitations to join the publication’s table was in the “dozens.”

This is a dinner that once attracted the likes of George Clooney and Steven Spielberg. On Saturday, it seemed as if the most au courant actor in town was Jason Isaacs, the Englishman who played the dad on the latest edition of “The White Lotus,” and whose character spent the season fantasizing about a murder-suicide.

Mark Leibovich, a correspondent for The Atlantic, said he found it refreshing to have an evening more focused on the act of reporting than a comedian’s speech.

Still, he added, “I wish we could have used the time we gained from that to all leave an hour earlier.”

The correspondents’ association represents hundreds of journalists who regularly cover the workings of the White House. Its autonomy has been undermined repeatedly by the Trump administration, which broke precedent by handpicking which outlets are granted access to the “pool” that covers smaller presidential events and has signaled plans to shake up the seating chart in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. (For decades, the correspondents’ association has overseen the pool and the seating chart.)

In February, the group announced that a comedian, Amber Ruffin, the actress and talk-show host, would be the dinner’s featured entertainer. Last month, Ms. Ruffin’s appearance was canceled. She had appeared on a podcast where she referred to the Trump administration as “kind of a bunch of murderers.”

Mr. Daniels said he wanted “to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division.”

Ms. Ruffin has since mocked the group for canceling her set, quipping: “We have a free press so that we can be nice to Republicans at fancy dinners — that’s what it says in the First Amendment.”

In previous years — including in 2018, during Mr. Trump’s first term — the White House press secretary attended the dinner and sat on the dais. Karoline Leavitt, Mr. Trump’s current press secretary, said she had turned down an invitation.

On Friday, during an interview with the Axios reporter Mike Allen, Ms. Leavitt was asked to describe the news media in one word.

“Exhausted,” she said, with a smile.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, along with state law enforcement officials, arrested about 780 immigrants in Florida in an operation this week, according to ICE data obtained by The New York Times.

The operation began on Monday and targeted undocumented immigrants with final deportation orders, according to an ICE official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the operation. The officers picked up more than 275 migrants with final removal orders, the data showed.

ABC News and Fox News earlier reported news of the arrests, which took place over four days.

It was the latest move by the Trump administration to seek to accelerate deportations of undocumented immigrants, which have so far been well below the administration’s goals.

Since President Trump took office, ICE officials have worked with various federal agencies to conduct raids across the United States. The effort this week in Florida was the first to be conducted as part of a formal arrangement with state law enforcement known as a 287(g) agreement, according to the official.

The Trump administration has sought to recruit local authorities to help in immigration operations in an effort to speed deportations. The administration has resumed collateral arrests during such operations, which allows officers to pick up migrants who were not initially targeted but were around an individual who was sought by ICE.

Generally, people must have received an order of removal from an immigration judge before they are deported, a process that can take weeks or stretch into years. But since the start of 2024, 70 percent of these removal orders were issued to someone who did not attend their hearing before a judge, according to a Times analysis of court records.

“It’s going to break up families,” said Tessa Petit, the executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, said of the arrests this week. “And that is not the welcoming state that Florida has been for immigrants for decades.”

Given the scale of the operation, Ms. Petit said, there is a chance that many of those arrested were in the country on some sort of legal status and did not possess criminal records.

The raids represented the biggest escalation of immigration enforcement in Florida since Mr. Trump took office, Ms. Petit said, adding that they were much more reflective of the president’s mass deportation promises.

ICE operations in communities take an extensive amount of research and surveillance. They also require many officers, which is why the Trump administration has pulled in several other law enforcement agencies.

Trump administration officials have increasingly turned to warning undocumented immigrants to leave the country.

“President Trump and I have a clear message to those in our country illegally: LEAVE NOW,” said Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, in a statement on Monday. “If you do not self-deport, we will hunt you down, arrest you and deport you.”

Orlando Mayorquín, Albert Sun and Miriam Jordan contributed reporting.

When Karl Molden, a sophomore at Harvard University from Vienna, learned that the Trump administration had abruptly restored thousands of international students’ ability to legally study in the United States, he said he did not feel reassured.

After all, immigration officials have insisted that they could still terminate students’ legal status, even in the face of legal challenges, and the administration has characterized the matter as only a temporary reprieve.

“They shouldn’t tempt us into thinking that the administration will stop harassing us,” Mr. Molden said. “They will try to find other ways.”

Mr. Molden is not alone in his worry.

The dramatic shift from the administration on Friday came after scores of international students filed lawsuits saying that their legal right to study in the United States had been rescinded, often with minimal explanation. In some cases, students had minor traffic violations or other infractions. In others, there appeared to be no obvious reason for the revocations.

After learning that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had deleted their records from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, many students sued to try to save their status. That prompted a flurry of emergency orders by judges that blocked the changes.

Students and their immigration lawyers said on Saturday that they were relieved for the temporary reprieve, but emphasized that it was just that — temporary.

Their sense of uncertainty was rooted in what Joseph F. Carilli, a Justice Department lawyer, told a federal judge on Friday. Mr. Carilli said that immigration officials had begun working on a new system for reviewing and terminating the records of international students and academics studying in the United States. Until the process was complete, he said, student records that had been purged from a federal database in recent weeks would be restored, along with the students’ legal status.

“This is a Band-Aid, but it’s not yet a successful surgery,” said Clay Greenberg, an immigration lawyer in New York who is representing several affected students. “The question that remains now is: Well, what is the new policy going to be?”

In the meantime, students have been left with the same anxieties as before, which began when the administration moved to cancel more than 1,500 student visas in recent weeks.

Kevin Zhang, a third-year law student at Columbia University from China, said virtually every Chinese student he knows is concerned about their visa status. People in the Chinese community on campus, he added, often exchange information about American and Chinese policies, trying to determine how it could affect them.

“It’s a very unstable and turbulent period,” said Mr. Zhang, 30.

Leo Gerdén, 22, a senior at Harvard from Sweden, described the Trump administration’s decision to reverse its international student visa revocations as “great news” but noted that the federal government is still demanding that Harvard turn over detailed information about its student body.

Mr. Gerdén, who studies economics and political science, has led rallies on Harvard’s campus to protest the administration’s efforts to target international students. Now, because of that activism, Mr. Gerdén said he feared he was a target.

“I have sort of accepted that being at commencement is not a guarantee anymore,” he said. “I’m definitely worried, but it is a risk that I’ve accepted because I think that what we’re fighting for here is just so much bigger than any one individual.”

Recently, Mr. Gerdén’s high school guidance counselor asked him for advice because several Swedish students had been accepted to the University of Notre Dame and Georgetown University, but they were now wary of moving to the United States, a sentiment that once felt almost inconceivable.

“The U.S. has always been the top dream for many people, and especially for me,” he said. “The entire college life and all the opportunities that come with studying at a university here has put U.S. universities in a very special position that is now being taken away.”

Evan Sulpizio Estrada, 20, a sophomore at Tufts University from San Diego, said his friends who were international students had in recent weeks expressed fear about their situation.

After the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts Ph.D. student from Turkey, many international students at the school stopped attending classes or eating in the cafeteria because they were afraid of being arrested, Mr. Sulpizio Estrada said. Still, he added, many of them were trying their best to continue living normal college lives.

Louie Yang, 18, a freshman from Beijing at Tufts, said that while some of his friends had expressed concerns about visa revocations, he had tried to not let politics distract from his academics.

“I’m not so worried about it,” Mr. Yang said.

Mr. Greenberg, the immigration lawyer, said he believed the situation exemplified “the unpredictability and chaos” coming from the Trump administration.

In recent weeks, Mr. Greenberg said, he has continued to be flooded with similar questions from international students: “Should I leave? Am I going to be arrested if I don’t leave tomorrow?”

President Trump said on Saturday that Russia’s escalating bombardment of Ukraine had left him concerned that Russia did not want to end the war as he issued an unusually stern rebuke of President Vladimir V. Putin and threatened new sanctions on Moscow.

“It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along and has to be dealt with differently,” Mr. Trump wrote of the Russian assault, hours after holding an impromptu meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Vatican.

Mr. Trump wrote on social media that “too many people” were dying and that “there was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns.” He said he was considering banking sanctions as well as “secondary sanctions,” penalties imposed on nations or parties that trade with the sanctioned country.

The statement came at a sensitive moment in the talks to end three years of full-scale conflict between Russia and Ukraine and after the United States proposed a peace plan this week that sharply favored Russia.

Mr. Trump, who upbraided Mr. Zelensky at the White House in February and has at times cast him as an impediment to peace, has maintained that he is exerting pressure on both countries to secure a deal.

But after Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, that killed at least 12 people on Thursday, Mr. Trump wrote on social media: “Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying. Let’s get the Peace Deal DONE!”

Since the assault, Mr. Trump has faced some pressure from within his own party to take a harder line on Moscow.

In a statement on Friday, Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, urged Mr. Trump to place heavy sanctions on Mr. Putin, saying that there was “clear evidence” that the Russian leader was “playing America as a patsy.”

Others joined him on Saturday. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said a bipartisan majority in the Senate was ready to support legislation that would place additional sanctions on countries that purchased Russian oil and gas, among other commodities. “The Senate stands ready to move in this direction and will do so overwhelmingly if Russia does not embrace an honorable, just and enduring peace,” he said.

In the House, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Alabama and the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said he urged “strong support, including from our European allies, for tougher sanctions on Russia’s energy sector.”

Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican from Pennsylvania, praised the meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky, saying “we need more of this,” while Representative Joe Wilson, a Republican from South Carolina, was more direct.

“Putin’s arrogance and murderous acts of cowardice will not be tolerated,” Mr. Wilson said. “He started this war and patience is wearing thin. America will not be insulted.”

As recently as Wednesday, Mr. Trump’s ire had been primarily trained on Mr. Zelensky, who strongly objected to the U.S.-backed peace plan.

“I thought it might be easier to deal with Zelensky,” Mr. Trump said at the White House on Wednesday, comparing Mr. Zelensky with Mr. Putin. “So far it’s been harder.”

But on Saturday, Mr. Trump seemed to be losing patience with Mr. Putin. Shortly after issuing his warning to the Russian leader, Mr. Trump posted an image that showed him and Mr. Zelensky in the Vatican, where they had gathered ahead of Pope Francis’ funeral.

In the image, the two men were hunched over in stackable red chairs, apparently deep in conversation.

Mr. Zelensky, who also shared an image of the meeting, wrote on social media that it had been productive and that he hoped it would lead to a “lasting peace that will prevent another war from breaking out.”

“Very symbolic meeting that has potential to become historic,” Mr. Zelensky wrote.