In the days since a cease-fire agreement took hold in the Gaza Strip, Israel has turned its attention to a Palestinian city about 75 miles northeast of the enclave — one with a long history of resistance and militant activity.

On Wednesday, as some of its troops withdrew from Gaza, the Israeli military said it was pressing ahead with an operation in Jenin, a city in the northern part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The city has for decades been a hotbed of militancy and a target of raids by Israeli security forces.

Since the war in Gaza began, Hamas has been increasingly popular and asserted its presence in the West Bank. Iran — which backs Hamas and other militant groups in the region — has flooded the territory with weapons. And the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank in coordination with Israel, has seen its tenuous influence further diminish.

Now, Israel seems to be focusing its attention on the West Bank, and Jenin in particular. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that Israel’s latest operation was aimed at “eradicating terrorism” and that it would be “extensive and significant.”

Here’s what to know about Jenin and Israel’s latest operation there.

What is happening?

On Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the Israeli military said that 10 militants had been “hit” during the operation in Jenin, without giving further details. Earlier, Israel said that it had killed eight militants since the start of the raid.

The Palestinian health ministry said that 10 people had been killed in Jenin and its outskirts since the start of the raid. And Palestinian officials cited by Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, said that at least four people had been injured in the city on Wednesday.

Other West Bank cities were also targeted in raids. The Palestinian Authority’s commission of prisoners’ affairs said that Israeli forces had arrested at least 25 Palestinians across the West Bank since Tuesday evening.

Why is Israel targeting the West Bank?

Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank has been losing support to factions like Hamas that favor armed struggle and are actively fighting Israel, according to a poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.

At the same time, deadly Israeli raids and attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank have escalated. Israeli leaders say the military raids are aimed at countering terrorism in the area.

Lt. Col. Herzi Halevi, the outgoing chief of staff of the Israeli military, said in a speech on Tuesday that his forces had killed 794 militants in the West Bank since the war in Gaza began. “In most cases, we thwarted the threat in advance before the terrorists could reach Israeli citizens,” he said.

Who is arming the militants?

Iran is operating a clandestine smuggling route across the Middle East, employing intelligence operatives, militants and criminal gangs to deliver weapons to Palestinians in the West Bank, according to officials from the United States, Israel and Iran. The goal is to foment unrest against Israel by flooding the territory with weapons, Iranian officials have said.

Israeli security forces have conducted a large-scale crackdown across the West Bank, saying that it is part of Israel’s counterterrorism efforts against Hamas and other armed factions.

What is Palestinian leadership doing?

The Palestinian Authority is the governing body in some areas of the occupied West Bank. In December, its security forces began cracking down on militants in and around Jenin, where the authority has lost control. The region is known as a stronghold for militant groups, including Hamas, calling for armed resistance to Israel.

The Palestinian Authority emerged from a peace process between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in the 1990s that was supposed to lead to the creation of a Palestinian state but never did.

In practice, the Israeli military — the occupying force in the territory — has security control over Palestinian cities. The Palestinian Authority handles some local matters, including trash collection, education, hospitals and schools, and has its own security forces who coordinate with their Israeli counterparts but have limited authority.

Jenin has long been a symbol of resistance.

The city’s reputation for resistance dates back to the 1930s, when Palestinians took up arms against British rule of Palestine during what was known as the Arab Revolt.

Later, in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that surrounded the creation of modern Israel and the flight or expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Jenin cemented its reputation as a city that never surrendered when Palestinian fighters, backed by Iraqi soldiers, repelled an Israeli attempt to take it.

The city is home to one of the original refugee camps set up for Palestinians displaced by that war.

In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank after a war with neighboring Arab states. Jenin’s resonance today, both for Palestinians and Israelis, largely stems from the second intifada, or uprising, against that Israeli occupation in the early 2000s.

Israelis recall the city as a source of dozens of suicide bombers sent into Israel at that time, and Palestinians remember a 10-day battle in 2002 between militants and Israeli forces that killed 52 Palestinians, up to half of whom may have been civilians, according to the United Nations.

Jenin has frequently been a target for raids by Israeli forces. Both Hamas, which controls Gaza, and the militant group Islamic Jihad have recruited in Jenin. And in recent years, newer militias loosely affiliated with the more established groups have emerged among a younger generation that is frustrated with a Palestinian leadership they see as corrupt and enabling of the Israeli occupation.

Lara Jakes, Raja Abdulrahim, Isabel Kershner, Erika Solomon and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

The State Department abruptly canceled travel for thousands of refugees already approved to fly to the United States, days before a deadline that President Trump had set for suspending the resettlement program that provides safe haven for people fleeing persecution.

The cancellation of the flights comes on the heels of an executive order signed by Mr. Trump on Monday that indefinitely paused the refugee resettlement. The order effectively grinds to a halt the process of bringing refugees into the country, which involves multiple federal agencies, as well as nonprofits that receive the newcomers.

More than 10,000 refugees were currently in the pipeline to travel to the United States, according to government data. They include Afghans who faced danger because of their association with the United States before the military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Among other refugees who had been approved for travel were people from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.

The sudden halt to the flights was an agonizing blow to refugees who had been following a complicated and lengthy process to enter the country legally, resettlement group workers said.

Angela Plummer, the executive director of Community Refugee & Immigration Services, which resettles refugees in Columbus, Ohio, said that the organization had been expecting dozens of arrivals on flights that had been suspended.

“These are people who followed all the rules and who are now left in danger,” said Ms. Plummer. “It’s heartbreaking.”

The decision to pause the refugee program is in line with Mr. Trump’s promise to crack down broadly on immigration.

Under the decades-old refugee program, people who have fled their home countries as a result of persecution, war or other life-threatening causes can legally immigrate to the United States. Mr. Trump said that continuing to receive them would burden communities that were not equipped to handle them, according to the order that he signed on Monday.

The State Department followed his order with a memo Tuesday that said “all previously scheduled travel of refugees to the United States is being canceled, and no new travel bookings will be made.” Organizations, such as the International Rescue Committee and others that assist refugees, it noted, “should not request travel for any additional refugee cases at this time.”

On Wednesday, U.S. refugee officers in Homeland Security agencies, such as U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, were told to stop making decisions on refugee cases, according to an internal memo obtained by The New York Times.

News that the Trump administration had canceled travel even for refugees already cleared to be resettled in communities across the United States shocked the leaders of nonprofit organizations that are contracted by the State Department to assist the newcomers.

“This abrupt halt to refugee admissions is devastating for families who have already endured unimaginable persecution and waited years for the chance to rebuild their lives in safety,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the head of Global Refuge, in a statement.

“Refugees go through one of the most rigorous vetting processes in the world,” she continued, “and it’s heartbreaking to see their dreams of safety derailed just days before, or in some cases, just hours before they were set to begin their new lives here.”

Eskinder Negash, president of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, said that “many people have been waiting for years, and in some instances decades, in refugee camps and have diligently gone through the refugee process to receive travel authorization.”

“Even if the refugee program is reopened in the future, the indefinite suspension of refugee travel and processing will have lasting trauma and impact on refugees and families,” he said.

Ms. Plummer said her group had been fielding calls from distraught clients who have been waiting years for their relatives to arrive, only to realize that the prospect of reunification is now bleak.

Among them is Nur Ahmed, who arrived in Columbus in 2010, after fleeing civil war in Somalia. He sponsored his child, young sister and mother to join him.

Their case was stalled during Mr. Trump’s first term as president.

Mr. Ahmed’s son and sister, both in their 20s, arrived last week, just before he returned to the White House. But his mother, 70, was expected early next month, and her arrival could be postponed indefinitely.

“I am very lucky that my son and sister arrived, but I feel sad that my mom is left behind,” he said.

Often members of the same family are assigned different travel dates, and in this case it could mean many more years of separation.

“Trump delayed us before; now he is back and he is delaying again,” said Mr. Ahmed, who is a cross-country truck driver. “All I feel is pain since Donald Trump arrived again.”

“I haven’t seen my mom since I left, and I don’t know when I will see her again,” he said in an interview, while hauling dry foods on a highway in Texas.

As part of an avalanche of executive orders to slash immigration, Mr. Trump suspended the refugee resettlement program as of Jan. 27. Officials with resettlement agencies had hoped that refugees who had completed a yearslong process and been booked on flights would still be able to travel to the United States.

In his first administration, Mr. Trump dismantled the refugee program by imposing additional layers of vetting of applicants who he deemed to pose security risks and lowering the goal for the number that the United States was willing to take.

The president makes an annual determination of how many refugees the United States is willing to accept in a given year, and the numbers have varied, with Republican presidents historically setting some of the highest caps.

However, the number of refugees admitted to the country sank to the lowest on record, to about 11,000 in 2020, Mr. Trump’s last year in office, down from 85,000 in 2016 under President Barack Obama. Mr. Trump prioritized religious minorities, mainly white Christians from countries like Moldova and Russia.

President Biden rebuilt the program, and refugee admissions soared, reaching 100,000 last year, the most in three decades.

This time, Mr. Trump has justified suspending refugee admissions on the grounds that they strain resources of cities that need to benefit Americans.

“The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans,” said the order, which was signed by Mr. Trump within hours of his inauguration.

Clinton Bailey, an American-Israeli academic whose research and documentation of the ancient traditions of the nomadic Bedouin tribes of the Middle East helped preserve a vanishing culture for posterity, died on Jan. 5 at his home in Jerusalem. He was 88.

The cause was heart failure, his son Michael said.

A native of Buffalo, Dr. Bailey spent some 50 years recording the oral poetry, negotiations, trials, wisdom of the elders, weddings, rituals, proverbs and stories of the tribes of the southern Israeli Negev Desert and the Sinai Peninsula. Traveling by Jeep to desert Bedouin encampments, sometimes joining their migrations for weeks on camel back, camera and tape recorder in hand, he created a record of a largely unwritten culture.

The task was urgent, he said, because Bedouin society, then largely illiterate, was on the cusp of rapid change. Modern borders, government restrictions and urbanization were beginning to encroach on their nomadic ways, and the advent of transistor radios, cars and mobile phones was sending the modern world swooshing in.

“I decided to try to capture that culture,” Dr. Bailey said in an interview in 2021 marking the donation of his archive of 350 hours of audio tape and a trove of prints and slides to the National Library of Israel. “I could already see it was beginning to disappear.”

The library described his collection in a statement as “a treasure of orally transmitted ancient culture, now irreplaceable, and not available via the younger generations of Bedouin who grew up exposed to modernity.”

Dr. Bailey was revered by many tribespeople, who credit him with preserving their ancient traditions. Daham al-Atawneh, a retired publisher from the Bedouin town of Hura in the Negev, said Dr. Bailey had done “very sacred work,” particularly in collecting poetry.

“This preserves it for eternity,” he said. “Maybe my children will want to go back to their history one day. There is a record now.”

Dr. Bailey also advocated for the rights of the Bedouin who have been locked in an unresolved land dispute with the Israeli government since the founding of the state. Few Bedouin had documents or deeds proving land ownership.

Dr. Bailey’s life appears to have been largely shaped by his curiosity and serendipitous encounters.

Born on April 24, 1936, as Erwin Glaser, he was the younger son of Benjamin and Edna Glaser, Jewish immigrants from Russia. Benjamin Glaser, a self-made businessman, started out with a single gas pump and ended up owning a chain of service stations in Buffalo.

While serving in the U.S. Navy after the Korean War, Erwin Glaser, while aboard a ship, met a rabbi who introduced him to the Jewish literature of Eastern Europe. That led to a meeting in New York with Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Polish-born Jewish American writer and Yiddishist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

After studying sculpture in Norway for a year, Mr. Glaser returned to the United States with the intention of studying Yiddish at Yeshiva University but ended up studying Hebrew in upstate New York. There he met his first Israeli, a member of a communal farm, or kibbutz. He moved to Israel in 1958, a decade after the establishment of the Jewish state.

In 1959, he met and then married Maya Ordinan. Born in Czernowitz, now part of Ukraine, she had come to Israel as a child.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in political science and Middle Eastern studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he spent a year in an Arab village in the Galilee hills, in northern Israel, teaching English and learning colloquial Arabic. He returned to the United States and earned a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University before returning to Israel in 1967.

At some point in the 1960s, he changed his name to Clinton Bailey, drawn from the intersection of Clinton Street and Bailey Avenue in Buffalo, the site of one of his father’s service stations. The change was in preparation for a trip to Pakistan, his son Michael, said, presumably to avoid sounding Jewish in an Islamic country, but, he added, the true reasons were never clear. Dr. Bailey was also known in Israel by his Hebrew name Itzchak, or the nickname Itzik.

Jobless, and wandering around Tel Aviv one day near the home of David Ben-Gurion, the founding prime minister of Israel, Dr. Bailey bumped into Paula Ben-Gurion, the leader’s spouse. They got to talking, and she invited him in for tea.

That chance meeting led to a friendship with the Ben-Gurions that proved formative for Dr. Bailey. Mr. Ben-Gurion helped him secure a job teaching English at an academy at Sde Boker, a remote kibbutz in the Negev desert. The Ben-Gurions later retired to Sde Boker, where they lived in a spacious but somewhat spartan cabin. Dr. Bailey would sometimes join the aging politician on his brisk walks around the kibbutz.

When out jogging alone, he would encounter Bedouin shepherds and strike up conversations. They would invite him back to their tents. He found their story — a life in the desert that harked back to pre-Biblical times — compelling. “It was a story of survival going back 4,500 years,” he said.

After the 1967 war, with Israel in control of the Egyptian Sinai, he gained access to even more remote tribes. He moved to Jerusalem in 1975.

In the 1980s, as an adviser on Arab affairs in Israel’s Ministry of Defense, Dr. Bailey frequented southern Lebanon, where Israel occupied a buffer zone. He focused on building relations with the Shiite Muslims there and recommended that the Israeli government do the same. But Israel instead aligned itself with the Christian Lebanese militias that were leading the Lebanese government at the time.

The partnership with the Christian militias led to one of the darkest moments in Israeli history, when the country was implicated in the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila perpetrated by the Christian Phalange militia. Soon Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite Lebanese militia, would emerge as a bitter enemy of Israel.

Dr. Bailey wrote four books on Bedouin poetry, proverbs, law and, most recently, “Bedouin Culture in the Bible,” published by Yale University Press in 2018. He also taught Middle East politics and Bedouin culture for many years at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.

In addition to Michael Bailey, he is survived by his wife and their three other sons, Daniel, ⁠Benjamin and Ariel, and nine grandchildren.

In 2016, at age 80, Dr. Bailey found a new kind of celebrity. He had interviewed his friend Mr. Ben-Gurion over three days in 1968 on film, recording him talking about his life and career and the birth of the Jewish state. The film was then lost for decades and largely forgotten.

When it was rediscovered by accident — the silent film in one archive in Jerusalem, the soundtrack in another in the Negev — it became the basis for an acclaimed 2016 documentary, “Ben-Gurion, Epilogue.”

In the interview, conducted five years before his death, Mr. Ben-Gurion offered an unusually raw, contemplative analysis of his life’s work. The documentary struck a chord in Israel, where many people were yearning for more humble leaders who showed more statesmanship.

The simplicity of the Ben-Gurions’ cabin at Sde Boker was “a statement,” Dr. Bailey told The New York Times at the time, adding: “I don’t think Ben-Gurion wanted the perks of power.”

The simplicity of desert life also drew Dr. Bailey to the Bedouin. In an effort to convey Bedouin ways to friends who were used to a more material world, he would occasionally relate the story of how he had turned up unexpectedly to visit some tribesmen. Offering hospitality was a cultural imperative, so they would procure some tea from here and eggs from there until they were able to offer him a meal.

Although they had little material goods themselves, the men did not consider this a hardship. “A Bedouin would wake up in the morning with nothing,” Dr. Bailey said, “and would consider himself fortunate if he had acquired something by bedtime.”

On the evening of Jan. 18, a 32-year-old Greek man went to the police with an unusual object that he said he had found in a plastic bag among trash bins near the northern city of Thessaloniki.

It was a headless, armless statue depicting a female form in a flowing, draped garment.

The police announced on Wednesday that the statue was believed to date from the Hellenistic period, after the death of Alexander the Great, from 323 B.C. to about 31 B.C.

The find has prompted an investigation among Greek crime, trafficking, antiquities and heritage protection units into its origins and how it could have wound up in the garbage.

The discovery of ancient artifacts in surprising places is not uncommon in a country as rich in history and archaeology as Greece. Relics are often unearthed during construction projects, such as those to prepare for the 2004 Olympics and subway system excavations.

“This is not the first time” civilians have handed over statues to police stations, said Vasilis Tempelis, a culture ministry spokesman, in an email on Wednesday.

The Ministry of Culture has completed a preliminary examination of the statue and concluded that it falls under Greek laws protecting antiquities, the police said. A three-person panel will try to to determine its composition and dating.

The A.P. said the statue stands about 31 inches high.

Dr. Bert Smith, a professor of classical archaeology at the universities of Oxford University and Bilkent University in Turkey, said that the statue appeared to be a small-scale figure of a goddess.

“The small size is typical for such marble votives set up to divinities in sanctuaries or temples,” he said in an email, basing his observations on official photographs of the statue.

“People prayed to divinities and made dedications to them in thanks for their favor,” Dr. Smith said. “Small statue figures, like this one, would be the expensive dedication of a private person.”

The figure’s clothing, depicting a heavy wool one-piece garment, is called a peplos by archaeologists, and was the common garb of divinities. But the statue’s arms and head were lost to the past.

“The arms might tell us what the figure was doing and what attributes it may have carried,” he said. And the head? “It got knocked off with the arms in the long later history of the figure.”

The first indication that tragedy had stricken their loved ones came around 5:30 a.m. in urgent messages to the family’s WhatsApp group.

A brother and sister, trapped inside a ski lodge in Turkey that had caught fire, were pleading for help.

“Save us,” they wrote, their uncle, Ozgur Turkmen, said in a phone interview. “We cannot reach our parents. There are no fire brigades.”

Within hours, the siblings and their parents were dead.

They were among the at least 79 people killed on Tuesday when a predawn blaze broke out in the Grand Kartal Hotel at a ski resort 180 miles east of Istanbul.

As the fire tore through the 12-story lodge surrounded by snow-capped peaks, guests who had come during Turkey’s winter break for ski vacations and the workers staying there found themselves inundated by thick smoke and struggling to escape.

Multiple survivors have said that they heard no fire alarms and could not find fire escapes. A Turkish engineers union said in a statement that photos from inside the hotel before the blaze showed no signs of a sprinkler system, which was supposed to have been installed years ago.

The sudden death of so many people during what was supposed to be a joyful winter trip has caused grief and outrage among survivors and relatives, some of whom have begun calling for accountability for officials who failed to ensure that the building was safe.

“I am angry, but I am suppressing it now,” Mr. Turkmen said. “I will first live my pain and then look for justice.”

Turkey’s justice minister said on Tuesday that prosecutors were investigating the blaze, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that anyone whose negligence had led to the fire would be punished.

On Wednesday, attending a funeral near the resort for an extended family that lost 14 members in the fire, Mr. Erdogan struck a somber tone.

“We were hurt. Our hearts were burned,” he said. “I wish for patience for the family and for our nation.”

The hotel was within walking distance to the slopes and provided amenities aimed at pampering the upper-middle-class families who vacationed there. Some returned with their children year after year.

It offered hot-stone and deep-tissue massages and had a playroom and indoor swimming pool. Its cozy, wood-paneled bar and restaurant had nooks for curling up near fireplaces.

The identities of those killed in the fire — reported in mournful statements and social media posts by colleagues, relatives, schools they attended and clubs they belonged to — indicated mostly affluent professionals, many alongside their children or other family members.

They included: A business school dean and his daughter. A 10-year-old competitive swimmer and her mother. Sixth- and ninth-grade siblings and their mother; the father survived. Brothers who were managers at an energy company, and one son each. An orthodontist, her husband and their two children. Two cooks who worked in the hotel.

Among those being mourned at the funeral that Mr. Erdogan attended was Zehra Gultekin, who worked in sales at Turkish Airlines. She died in the fire along with her husband, their four children and nine other relatives.

Mr. Turkmen, whose niece and nephew had messaged relatives for help, said they had been on vacation with their father, Nedim, an accountant and newspaper columnist, and their mother, Ayse, a workplace-safety expert.

The family loved the hotel and had returned to it every winter for more than a decade, he said.

The daughter, Ala Dora, 18, was in her last year of high school and had intended to study English or social sciences in Britain.

Her brother, Yuce Ata, 22, had earned an economics degree in London and returned to Turkey to start a trade business.

She skied. He snowboarded.

When other relatives saw the siblings’ messages, Mr. Turkmen said, they called him and he drove to the hotel. He later received his relatives’ bodies, and it appeared that they had been trying to flee when they perished.

“The key card was in my brother’s pocket, and he took cash,” Mr. Turkmen said. “My sister-in-law had her clothes on.”

Deniz Bilici Gocmen, who was Nedim’s editor at Sozcu newspaper, said in a phone interview that she had grown tired of disasters in Turkey causing what should have been avoidable deaths.

“As a citizen, I go to bed each night thinking about what I am going to wake up to each morning,” she said, recalling recent earthquakes and a deadly coal mine explosion.

“Such grave and heavy losses,” she said.

President Trump’s call for the State Department to start the process of designating certain cartels as global terrorists and foreign terrorist organizations could give his administration more power to impose economic penalties, travel restrictions and potentially even take military action inside foreign nations.

In the executive order he issued on Monday, Mr. Trump named two gangs in particular that operate inside the United States: the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua and the El Salvadoran MS-13. Using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the government could take additional steps to disrupt the financial networks of the gangs.

While MS-13 has been active in the country for decades, Tren de Aragua has had a growing presence in the country in recent years, coinciding with an influx of Venezuelans coming to the United States for refuge.

It is up to the State Department to decide which organizations to tag as foreign terrorist organizations, a decision it makes after consulting with other agencies in the federal government, which can take months. Mr. Trump’s order gave just 14 days for State to make a recommendation.

The department typically gives the label to groups with ideological objectives, while drug cartels and gangs have financial motivations.

Previously, Mr. Trump has indicated he wants to declare certain Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, as a way to apply maximum pressure on the country to rein in its dangerous drug trade. On Monday, as he signed the executive order in the Oval Office, he said Mexico will probably be unhappy with this step.

Mr. Trump sought to slap the designation on the cartels during his first term, but was ultimately dissuaded by Mexican officials who pledged to cooperate with the United States on fighting them. Similar proposals have been introduced in Congress.

Analysts say the U.S. government already has many of these tools available for use against cartels, which is why some caution that the designation is not necessary and could bring more violence.

Here’s what is expected if the State Department makes the designation.

It would send a message to the world.

Attaching the label to cartels would send a message to the rest of the world that the United States is serious about defeating them.

Those who support the designation often point to violence against Americans to justify the classification. But military action against the cartels could lead to more organized attacks on Americans, including inside the United States.

“Drug cartels could easily turn into real terrorist organizations,” Brian Michael Jenkins, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation, has said.

As it is now, drug cartels have not carried out politically motivated attacks on Americans or American interests. They are not targeting American embassies or U.S. vessels in the Gulf of Mexico, for example.

“Where violence occurs, it’s usually a byproduct of some of the financial dealings related to the criminality associated with the movement of drugs,” said Jason Blazakis, the former director of the State Department’s counterterror finance and designations office. He was referring to violence against Americans committed by Mexican drug cartels.

Prosecutors could use criminal charges that cast a wide net.

Once an organization is labeled a terrorist group, it is against the law for people in the United States to knowingly provide support to it. Given the drug distribution system across the country — from kingpins to corner drug slingers and buyers — this could significantly broaden the number of people facing serious repercussions, potentially ensnaring people whose connections to the cartel are tenuous.

The charge of material support to terrorism carries up to a 20-year prison sentence and in some cases life in prison if the support results in death. It is not clear what this would mean for dealers in the United States whose clients die from overdoses.

U.S.-Mexico trade and diplomacy could sour.

Mexico is one of America’s largest trading partners. Fracturing the relationship between the two countries could have significant economic repercussions, including on millions of American jobs.

Mexico also has been integral to helping to control illegal crossings into the United States. If Mexico ended those efforts, it could lead to an increase in unlawful migration at a time when a top priority of the new administration is to reduce those flows.

“The impact on diplomatic relations would be severe,” said Mr. Blazakis, now a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif.