The secretive Capitol Police Board is poised for an overhaul, if not elimination, after the Jan. 6 riot.

The secretive Capitol Police Board is poised for an
overhaul, if not elimination, after the Jan. 6 riot. 1
The Senate is set to debate President Biden’s nearly $2 trillion stimulus plan on Friday as Democrats prepare to barrel past widespread Republican opposition.CreditCredit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

Senate Democrats, working to preserve moderate support for President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package, plan to drop their effort to increase a federal unemployment payment from $300 a week to $400, but extend it for an additional month, through Oct. 4, making another key concession to keep the pandemic aid plan on track.

With the existing $300-a-week payments set to lapse on March 14, Mr. Biden’s stimulus proposal and the House bill that passed last weekend to implement it would increase the jobless aid to $400 weekly and extend it through the end of August.

But some moderate Senate Democrats are opposed to raising the amount, while other Democrats were concerned about the possibility that the benefits could lapse when the chamber is typically on recess and out of Washington. The revision under discussion would address both issues, as well as adding a provision to make a large portion of 2020 jobless benefits tax-free.

In a brief interview, Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and the chairman of the Finance Committee, said the change “avoids the August cliff, secures tax forgiveness — preventing what I call the unexpected unemployment tax surprise — and keeps the caucus together.”

It was aimed at appeasing centrist Democrats who might otherwise have been tempted to vote for a Republican amendment to cut the unemployment benefit to $300 per week — without extending it or including any tax sweeteners — thus sapping support for the bill among other Democrats. But there appeared to be issues with the proposal on Friday afternoon, as Democrats delayed a vote to haggle over the details.

The White House had signaled support for the alternative, with Ron Klain, the chief of staff, tweeting, “This compromise is a great result.”

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The proposal, introduced by Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, was just one of dozens of amendments the Senate was set to consider on Friday as it made its way through a marathon session of rapid-fire votes. The vote-a-rama, as it is known, could stretch long past midnight as Republicans battle against the bill, paving the way for a Senate vote to pass the stimulus plan as early as Saturday.

The unemployment provision would forgive up to $10,200 in taxes on unemployment benefits received through in 2020. Mr. Wyden, who was among those pushing to increase the unemployment payment to $400, said on the Senate floor that he was “really hoping this brings all sides of the Senate together.”

Democrats are racing against the clock, as some Americans have already begun to file their taxes and unemployment benefits are set to begin lapsing next weekend. The agreement would also extend tax rules regarding excess business loss limitations for one additional year, through 2026.

The threat of yet another late night in the Senate comes after Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, demanded that a group of Senate clerks read all 628 pages of the legislation on the floor before debate could continue. The process began on Thursday at 3:21 p.m., and for 10 hours and 44 minutes, the clerks took turns reading passages to a virtually empty chamber. The Senate did not adjourn until 2:05 a.m.

But the Republican efforts to slow action on the Senate floor were expected to have little effect on the final legislation.

Each party holds 50 seats in the chamber, giving Democrats a one-vote margin of control thanks to Vice President Kamala Harris’s power to break ties. Senate Democrats, having already made significant revisions to the text the House approved over the weekend, are working to remain united. Republicans are expected to oppose the bill en masse, arguing that it is too costly and not targeted enough.

The White House continues to make the case that a robust stimulus package is needed, after a positive jobs report on Friday.
Credit…Oliver Contreras for The New York Times

President Biden will receive a briefing from his economic team on Friday afternoon as the U.S. labor market shows signs of improvement and the Senate barrels ahead with a bill that would pump nearly $2 trillion in relief funds into the economy.

Mr. Biden, who will be joined at the White House by Vice President Kamala Harris, will be briefed by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen; Cecilia Rouse, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers; Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council; and Michael Pyle, chief economic adviser to Ms. Harris.

The meeting comes on a day when the Labor Department reported that the United States added 379,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate ticked down to 6.2 percent. Gains in the leisure and hospitality industries — like bars and restaurants — offered hope that the sectors that have been hit hardest by the pandemic are finally starting to see improvement.

But the White House is not celebrating the figures and top officials on Friday continued to make the case that a robust stimulus package is needed.

Ron Klain, White House chief of staff, said on Twitter that it would take until April 2023 for the labor market to get back to where it was a year ago at the current pace of job creation.

The $1.9 trillion relief legislation under consideration in the Senate is facing fierce opposition from Republicans who believe it is too costly and contains a wish list of Democratic policy items. But those concerns will largely be bypassed through a parliamentary procedure that will allow the bill to pass with just a simple majority — and Democrats control the chamber.

Senators planned to hold three hours of debate before engaging in a rapid-fire series of votes on proposed amendments. Some are likely to force lawmakers into casting politically tough votes, while others could draw enough support to further tweak the legislation.

Once it passes the Senate, it will go back to the House for a final vote, with Mr. Biden expected to sign the bill into law later this month.

Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, during a meeting of the House impeachment managers last month.
Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times

A House Democrat who unsuccessfully prosecuted Donald J. Trump at his impeachment trial last month sued him in federal court on Friday for acts of terrorism and incitement to riot, attempting to use the justice system to punish the former president for his role in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.

The suit brought by Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, accuses Mr. Trump and key allies of inciting the deadly attack and conspiring with rioters to try to prevent Congress from formalizing President Biden’s election victory. And like the case laid out in the Senate, which acquitted him, it meticulously traces a monthslong campaign by Mr. Trump to undermine confidence in the 2020 election and then overturn its results.

“The horrific events of January 6 were a direct and foreseeable consequence of the defendants’ unlawful actions,” asserts the civil suit, filed for Mr. Swalwell in Federal District Court in Washington. “As such, the defendants are responsible for the injury and destruction that followed.”

Though not a criminal case, the suit charges Mr. Trump and his allies with several counts including conspiracy to violate civil rights, negligence, incitement to riot, disorderly conduct, terrorism and inflicting serious emotional distress — findings that could severely tarnish his legacy and political standing. If found liable, Mr. Trump could be subject to compensatory and punitive damages; if the case proceeds, it might also lead to an open-ended discovery process that could turn up information about his conduct and communications that eluded impeachment prosecutors.

In addition to the former president, the suit also names as defendants his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, who led the effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s election defeat when Congress met on Jan. 6 to formalize the results. All three men joined Mr. Trump in promoting and speaking at a rally in Washington that day, which Mr. Swalwell says lit the match for the violence that followed.

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Read the Suit: Swalwell v. Trump

The suit from Representative Eric Swalwell accuses Mr. Trump and several allies of inciting the attack and conspiring with rioters to try to prevent Congress from formalizing President Biden’s victory.

Read Document

A majority of the Senate, including seven Republicans, voted to find Mr. Trump “guilty” based on the same factual record last month, but the vote fell short of the two-thirds needed to convict him. Even Republicans who voted to acquit him, like Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, concluded that Mr. Trump was culpable for the assault. Many Republicans argued that the Senate simply lacked jurisdiction to punish a president no longer in office, and said the courts were the proper venue for those seeking to hold him accountable.

The lawsuit adds to Mr. Trump’s mounting legal woes. Another Democratic congressman, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, has already filed suit on similar grounds in recent weeks with the N.A.A.C.P. Prosecutors in New York have active investigations into his financial dealings, and in Georgia prosecutors are investigating his attempts to pressure election officials to reverse his loss.

In a statement, Jason Miller, an adviser to Mr. Trump, blasted Mr. Swalwell as a “a lowlife with no credibility” but did not comment on the merits of the case. Mr. Brooks rejected the claims, saying he would wear Mr. Swalwell’s “scurrilous and malicious lawsuit like a badge of courage.”

Mr. Giuliani and a lawyer for Donald Trump Jr. did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Both Mr. Thompson’s suit and Mr. Swalwell’s rely on civil rights law tracing to the 19th century Ku Klux Klan Act, but their aims appear to differ. The earlier suit targets Mr. Trump’s association with right-wing extremist groups, naming several groups as defendants and explicitly detailing racialized hate it claims figured in the attack. Mr. Swalwell focuses more narrowly on the alleged scheme by Mr. Trump and his inner circle.

During the Senate trial, Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers flatly denied that he was responsible for the assault and made broad assertions that he was protected by the First Amendment when he urged supporters gathered on Jan. 6 to “fight like hell” to “stop the steal” he said was underway at the Capitol.

Hiring picked up last month as states lifted restrictions and stepped up vaccination efforts, with the government reporting on Friday that the American economy added 379,000 jobs last month.

The pace of hiring in February was an unexpectedly large improvement over the gains made in January. It was also the strongest showing since October.

But there are still about 9.5 million fewer jobs today than a year ago. Congress is considering a $1.9 trillion package of pandemic relief intended to carry struggling households and businesses through the coming months.

“What we’re seeing is broad, slow gains,” said Julia Pollak, an economist at the online job site ZipRecruiter. “It’s consistent with a slow reawakening of the labor market after a winter hibernation.”

The unemployment rate in February was 6.2 percent, down from the previous month’s rate of 6.3 percent. But as the Federal Reserve and top administration officials have emphasized, that number understates the extent of the damage.

Most of the February gains came in the leisure and hospitality industries, including restaurant and bars, which have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic. “There’s still a long way to go,” Ms. Pollak said, “but thank goodness it’s moving in the right direction and not continuing to hemorrhage jobs. The industry is a first rung on the ladder and employs so many young people.”

The retail and manufacturing sectors posted small gains. Losses in employment by state and local governments — mostly in education — pared the overall increase, however.


Leisure and hospitality saw gains, but state and local governments lost jobs

Cumulative change in jobs since before the pandemic, by industry

By Ella Koeze·Seasonally adjusted·Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

More than four million people have quit the labor force in the last year, including those sidelined because of child care and other family responsibilities or health concerns. They are not included in the official jobless count.

The impact has also been uneven. The share of Black women who have left the labor force is more than twice as high as the share of white men.

“We’re still in a pandemic economy,” said Julia Coronado, founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives and a former Federal Reserve economist. “Millions of people are looking for work and willing to work, but they are constrained from working.”

Millions of workers are still relying on unemployment benefits and other government assistance, and first-time jobless claims rose last week, but analysts have offered increasingly optimistic forecasts for growth later in the year.

Recruiting sites have had an increase in job postings in recent weeks. Tom Gimbel, chief executive of LaSalle Network, a Chicago staffing firm, said the employers he speaks to are “absolutely ready to hire.”

President Biden visiting a Covid-19 vaccination center in Bethesda, Md. 
Credit…Oliver Contreras for The New York Times

President Biden is enjoying a level of popularity his poll-obsessed predecessor never came close to achieving — a 60 percent approval rating — with 70 percent of Americans expressing support for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new poll.

Despite enduring and stark partisan divisions, 44 percent of Republicans approve of Mr. Biden’s actions prioritizing the fight against the virus, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released early Friday.

As a temperature check of the current national mood, the poll suggests that Republican lawmakers in Washington, who have united to oppose Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill, are not swaying public opinion, despite their efforts to alter or delay its passage.

In all, 22 percent of Republicans approve of Mr. Biden’s performance, suggesting small but substantial gains among his most hard-core opponents that could give him added political leverage, paving the way for the possibility of a big bipartisan deal on infrastructure.

Mr. Biden’s overall approval among Democrats is a solid 94 percent, despite recent criticism from progressives.

Mr. Trump sustained a similar level of support from his base, but is the only president in the history of modern polling to never post an aggregate approval rating above 50 percent. His level of support has sunk, to an average of about 38 percent, after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Friday’s poll is a bit sunnier than other recent national surveys that show a slight decrease in support for Mr. Biden as the fight over his relief package heats up on Capitol Hill. A RealClearPolitics aggregation of polls put his approval rating at 53.4 percent, not factoring in the A.P. poll.

Mr. Biden’s grades on the economy were lower than his ratings on other issues, the poll found. His approval on pocketbook issues was 55 percent. Only 17 percent of Republicans, a group that gave former President Donald J. Trump high marks for his handling of the economy even during the pandemic-related downturn, approved of Mr. Biden’s approach to the economy.

The A.P. poll, unsurprisingly, found that the atmosphere of hyper partisanship exacerbated by Mr. Trump’s four years of provocation is not subsiding under Mr. Biden, and that people in both parties tend to interpret fact through the filter of ideology.

Americans’ views on the economy have shifted dramatically even though many basic economic statistics have budged little, if at all.

In December, 67 percent of Republicans and just 15 percent of Democrats described the economy as “good,” according to an A.P. poll taken at the time. Now, 35 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of Democrats describe the economy in positive terms.

The poll, which surveyed 1,434 adults between Feb. 23 and March 1, has an overall sampling error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

“I’ve got more to do than I’ve got hours of the day,” said Susan E. Rice, the head of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council. “It’s new terrain, so it’s fun.”
Credit…Hilary Swift for The New York Times

When President Biden and his top advisers decided to bomb Iran-backed militias in Syria last week, Susan E. Rice was not in the room.

Ms. Rice, who was national security adviser in the Obama administration and now runs the Domestic Policy Council for Mr. Biden, acknowledges a sense of relief that she does not have to tackle the same national security problems she left behind four years ago. Instead of Syria and Saudi Arabia, she is focused on an array of issues like health care, immigration and gun safety, as well as instilling racial equity throughout the government.

That relief, however, is coupled with some fear of missing out.

“I kind of wish I had been in the room just to hear all the considerations,” Ms. Rice said Saturday during a Zoom interview, discussing the military action in Syria. “But I’ve got more to do than I’ve got hours of the day. It’s new terrain, so it’s fun.”

On paper, running the little-known Domestic Policy Council is a small role for someone who made the short list for vice president and later hoped for a top national security job.

But Ms. Rice, one of the few senior Black women in the West Wing, has been brought in with a mandate to elevate the council and to operate as part of a policy troika alongside Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, and Brian Deese, the director of the National Economic Council.

This was not where she originally thought she would end up. But during the transition, when it was unclear whether Democrats would win control of the Senate, Ms. Rice’s conversations with the Biden team switched from cabinet positions, like defense secretary and secretary of state, to White House roles that would not require Senate confirmation. The inevitable relitigation by Republicans of Ms. Rice’s role in responding to the 2012 terrorist attack on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya, which left four Americans dead, was not what anyone believed would be a ticket to confirmation.

The domestic policy job typically goes to someone who is not a household name but is steeped in domestic policy. It is also considered relatively lacking in visibility and prestige, operating as a distant third player behind the National Economic Council and the National Security Council.

Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, said that in accepting the position, Ms. Rice had told him she wanted the resources to make the Domestic Policy Council more of an internal force.

“We wanted her to have an N.S.C.-like process,” Mr. Klain said. “She’s like, ‘Well, then I need an N.S.C.-like like staff and budget.’ We weren’t quite able to match the N.S.C., but we did significantly plus up the number of staff she has.”

Now, Ms. Rice occupies the West Wing office that was previously inhabited by Stephen Miller, President Donald J. Trump’s top policy adviser. And instead of having a principal deputy serving under the director, she has appointed four senior deputies who are experts in their fields.

“I’m not a health care policy expert,” she said. “The single deputy structure means everything is a bottleneck. I’ve got these high-powered deputies, and that’s how we’re going to get stuff done.”

Alexei A. Navalny inside a glass cage before a hearing on slander charges in Moscow, last month. President Biden applied sanctions on Russia over their treatment of Mr. Navalny.
Credit…Babushkinsky District Court/EPA, via Shutterstock

President Biden, faced with a decision about how to punish Saudi Arabia for its role in the assassination of a dissident journalist, gathered top national security officials in the Oval Office and pushed them at length about their recommended response. Then he sided with a majority of advisers who argued against the most severe action — a direct sanction of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who American intelligence agencies say approved the killing.

That same week, Mr. Biden approved relatively modest airstrikes in retaliation against Iranian-backed militias who had attacked an American outpost in Iraq. This week, he matched modest European sanctions on Russia for its poisoning and jailing of Aleksei A. Navalny, the opposition politician, leaving room for what are expected to be harsher moves this month against Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.

And, to avoid being surprised, Mr. Biden is beginning to rein in the military’s freedom to use drone strikes outside of war zones.

The Biden foreign policy that emerges from these early weeks is one of restraint, caution and fast-paced deliberation. Decisions come more quickly than they did in the Obama administration, when Mr. Biden, as vice president, complained about the endless meetings.

Early evidence suggests that his judgments come with a harder edge than they did when he was one of many voices in the Situation Room, as indicated by Mr. Biden’s decision to cut off the American weapons that allowed the Saudis to prosecute the war in Yemen. It was President Barack Obama who first turned on that weapons spigot.

To Mr. Biden’s supporters, it is all a triumph of rationality. To his critics, Mr. Biden’s first few weeks on the world stage are a lost opportunity to penalize a murderous leader, end drone strikes altogether or flip the switch quickly to get back into the Iran nuclear deal.

A Capitol Police officer in the Capitol on Thursday. The agency is overseen by a secretive panel that has been strongly criticized for its actions before and during the Jan. 6 attack.
Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

The congressional inquiry into the security failures surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol assault has barely begun, but one outcome already seems certain: The Capitol Police Board, the secretive three-member panel that oversees protection of the complex where Congress meets, is headed for major changes, if not outright elimination.

Lawmakers of both parties in the House and the Senate, some previously unfamiliar with the sweeping authority of the board, have expressed astonishment at its lack of accountability and its inability to rapidly respond to the riot at the Capitol.

“It seems nonfunctioning to me,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut and chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, which controls money for Capitol security. “Nobody is in charge. When something goes wrong, no one has the ultimate responsibility.”

New tension over the board’s power emerged on Thursday as Yogananda D. Pittman, the acting chief of the Capitol Police, appealed to House and Senate leaders to intercede to persuade the panel to grant her department’s emergency request to extend the deployment of National Guard troops at the Capitol. After her letter to the leaders became public, the board gave its approval. But the episode was reminiscent of events in the run-up to Jan. 6, when the panel rebuffed a request from the Capitol Police for National Guard reinforcements to counter a threat that had been identified by intelligence, with disastrous consequences.

Like many things on Capitol Hill, the board is a remnant of the past that has survived in large part because it suits those who hold power in Congress. A long line of House and Senate leaders in both parties have favored its existence because they handpick two of its three voting members, giving them tremendous influence over security operations with little public scrutiny.

At House and Senate hearings in recent days, lawmakers have been struck by the fact that two days before the attack, members of the board dismissed the Capitol Police request for troops to be on hand on Jan. 6. They acted with no vote, little discussion or consultation with other authorities, and no involvement by the architect of the Capitol. Then on the day of the riot, board members struggled to connect and agree to declare an emergency so that troops who were standing by to assist could be summoned to the Capitol.

Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, the senior Republican on the Rules Committee, said the assault underscored longstanding problems with the police board that necessitate major changes.

“I don’t think it works well in the best of circumstances and I think it’s almost totally unworkable in crisis, and Jan. 6 was a great example of that,” Mr. Blunt said.

For decades, coal was king in eastern Kentucky. With poverty rates near 30 percent, residents are skeptical of more promises of economic recovery.
Credit…Scott Olson/Getty Images

From a porch in Martin County, Ky., in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty. Decades later, President Barack Obama dedicated millions of dollars to work force development projects in Appalachia. President Donald J. Trump even pledged the impossible: a revival of the region’s faltering coal industry.

President Biden is talking big, too, assuring residents that his climate plan will also create well-paying jobs there. But after generations of promises, communities once reliant on coal mining are skeptical.

In eastern Kentucky, the poverty rate in several counties exceeds 30 percent. Unemployment is among the highest in the nation. And an outward migration over several decades has cut the populations of some counties nearly in half, leaving local governments strapped for tax revenue and struggling to fund essential services.

“Fifty years from now, this could be a ghost town,” said former Gov. Paul E. Patton, an eastern Kentucky native. “That’s my prediction.”

Days after taking office, Mr. Biden signed an executive order on climate change that also promised a new focus on economic development in communities that have been reliant on coal mining and power plants. A committee tasked with wrestling with the problem was given 60 days to make a plan. “We’re never going to forget the men and women who dug the coal and built the nation,” the president said. “We’re going to do right by them.”

Without direct federal help, local residents and experts say, people living in those communities could suffer increasingly dire consequences as the nation moves away from coal for good — ending the boom-and-bust cycle that dominated their economies with a final and decisive bust.

How the new administration follows through on its promise could be a determining factor in whether some of these communities survive at all, local residents say.

Dan Mosley, the county judge executive of Harlan County, believes that the president should consider tax incentives for people who move to distressed Appalachian counties, a highway extension and the reduction of red tape for federal grants that fund economic development projects.

“I hope this plan that’s been written isn’t just some promise to get our hopes up here,” he said.

Federico G. Klein was included in a poster seeking information on several people seen in the crowd that stormed the Capitol.
Credit…FBI

The F.B.I. said on Thursday that it had arrested a former State Department aide on charges related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, including unlawful entry, violent and disorderly conduct, obstructing Congress and law enforcement, and assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon.

The former midlevel aide, Federico G. Klein, who federal investigators said in court documents was seen in videos of the riot resisting officers and assaulting them with a stolen riot shield, is the first member of the Trump administration to face criminal charges in connection with the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

He worked on Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and began working at the State Department just days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, according to a financial disclosure form he filed as an executive branch employee.

Mr. Klein’s arrest was reported earlier by Politico.

The F.B.I. said in a court document that it received a tip about Mr. Klein in January, on the day after it included his image in a poster seeking information about several people seen in the crowd that had stormed the Capitol. A tipster provided investigators with Mr. Klein’s Facebook account, and a different witness later contacted them to say that he knew the man in the poster as “Freddie Klein,” according to the document.

Based on this information, the F.B.I. determined that when Mr. Klein allegedly attacked Congress on Jan. 6 to help Mr. Trump unlawfully maintain power, he was still employed by the State Department and possessed a Top Secret security clearance, the bureau said in the document.

Mr. Klein can be seen in video footage and other images dressed in a red “Make America Great Again” hat, slacks and a dress shirt as he tries to break past a line of Metropolitan Police officers in a tunnel near the west terrace, according to the document. “Klein quickly pushed his way to the front-left side of the crowd and to the doorway to the Capitol building, where he physically and verbally engaged with the officers holding the line,” the F.B.I. said.

He was part of a mob that tried to push through the doors despite warnings by an officer to back up, the F.B.I. said, and used a “riot shield that apparently had been taken from an officer” to prevent the closing of the doors.

Mr. Klein was seen in other videos “calling back to the crowd behind him, ‘We need fresh people, we need fresh people’ multiple times,” the F.B.I. said.

The Justice Department’s aggressive and sprawling investigation into the attack on the Capitol has led to criminal charges against more than 300 people, including dozens of far-right extremists who have been accused of conspiring to attack Congress in order to stop the final certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College victory.

Many defendants have said that they acted at the behest of Mr. Trump, who had falsely asserted that he won the November election.

In recent weeks, the investigation has edged closer to Mr. Trump. Last month, investigators began examining the communications of some right-wing extremists who had breached the Capitol to determine whether Roger J. Stone Jr., a close associate of the former president, had played any role in their plans to attack Congress. Mr. Stone has denied any wrongdoing.

Blanca Estella Flores Lopez of Honduras, with her daughter Caterin, in a Texas bus station last month. They had been dropped off by Border Patrol agents after being detained for three days.
Credit…Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

In an attempt to prevent the detention of migrant families for weeks or months at a time, the Biden administration plans to release parents and children within 72 hours of their arrival in the United States, a new policy that already is being carried out along the Texas border.

The plan, confirmed on Thursday by three Homeland Security officials, marks a significant departure from the handling of migrant families under the Trump and Obama administrations, when children often showed symptoms of depression and trauma after spending long periods in custody with their parents.

The decision to avoid lengthy detention of families comes amid a significant spike in the number arriving at the southwestern border in recent months that has posed an early test of President Biden’s pledge to create a more humanitarian approach to immigration.

Former President Donald J. Trump had vowed to end what he called the “catch and release” policies of his predecessors and significantly increased the number of asylum-seekers who were held in detention facilities, rather than being allowed to settle around the country as they waited for the immigration courts to decide whether they could stay.

Under the latest plan, Immigration and Customs Enforcement will hold families only for the time required to schedule court dates, conduct Covid-19 tests and arrange for them to be transferred to shelters, where volunteers and aid workers help schedule their travel to join relatives already in the country.

It was not clear when the plan would be fully rolled out, according to the officials, who spoke under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

About 100 families per day would be processed and released from two existing family residential centers in Texas. Those who test positive for the coronavirus would remain in isolation at a border facility for 10 days.

As of Thursday, several dozen migrants traveling as families were being held at a facility in Karnes City, Texas, and more than 300 at another, in Dilley, Texas. The two detention centers have a combined capacity of 3,200.

Immigrant advocates said they welcomed the change, but insisted that families should not be detained for any period of time.

“The changes at the Karnes and Dilley family prisons are, at best, reversible operational changes that reduce the harm of long-term detention, and at worst, a temporary move to quell concern about this controversial immigration policy,” said Andrea Meza, director of family detention services at Raices, a nonprofit organization in Texas that represents immigrants. “Medical and mental health experts unilaterally agree that there is no safe way to detain a child.”

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