Ziggy Duchnowski spent Saturday morning car shopping along Northern Boulevard in Queens with two goals in mind.

He wanted to find a new small car for his wife, and he hoped to strike a deal before the new tariffs that President Trump is imposing on imported cars and trucks affect prices.

“The word on the street is prices are going to shoot up now,” said Mr. Duchnowski, 45, a union carpenter who voted for Mr. Trump, holding the hands of his two small children.

The tariffs — 25 percent on vehicles and parts produced outside the United States — will have a broad impact on the North American auto industry. They are supposed to go into effect on April 3 and are sure to raise the prices of new cars and trucks.

They will also force automakers to adjust their North American manufacturing operations and scramble to find ways to cut costs to offset the tariffs. And for now at least, they are spurring some consumers to buy vehicles before sticker prices jump.

Analysts estimate that the tariffs will significantly increase the prices of new vehicles, adding a few thousand dollars for entry-level models to $10,000 or more for high-end cars and trucks. Higher prices for new vehicles are also likely to nudge used-car prices higher.

Every automaker will feel some kind of impact. General Motors builds a large number of highly profitable pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles in Canada and Mexico. Toyota and Honda make popular S.U.V.s in Canada. Volkswagen assembles the Jetta sedan, Tiguan S.U.V. and other popular models in Mexico.

“Once the tariffs go into effect and people start receiving quotes that represent these 25 percent increases, that’s when it’s going to start to sink in,” said Bill Pacilli, the sales manager at Lynnes Hyundai in Bloomfield, N.J.

Close to half the cars that Hyundai sells in the United States are imported from South Korea, he said. “They’re going to be hit with the tariffs in about a month or two,” Mr. Pacilli said. “Of course we’re concerned. Any effect in pricing is going to affect sales volume.”

While many dealers did not see a noticeable increase in buyers on Saturday, Jeremy Gleason, general manager at McGrath Subaru Evanston in Skokie, Ill., said his dealership had its biggest sales day since it opened in 2021.

“It’s been nuts,” Mr. Gleason said. “The tariffs have come up a lot and pushed people to move forward quicker.” He added that his dealership typically sells about 15 cars on Saturdays but sold 32 on this one.

Alvaro Duarte, an Ecuadorean immigrant who lives in West New York, N.J., went to Hudson Toyota in Jersey City, N.J., on Saturday to trade in his gas-powered car for an electric model, fearing prices would rise if he waited.

“Tariffs affect everyone,” said Mr. Duarte, 37. In his free time, he said, he often uses his car to earn money on the side as an Amazon Flex delivery driver. “If the prices go up, I need to pay more for my car, and that’s more expensive for me and my family,” he said. “I made the change because with electric cars there is no gasoline and less maintenance.”

Meanwhile, a salesman at Audi Manhattan in New York, Abdul Azeez, said traffic was no brisker than usual, and suggested it was because the people who live in the neighborhood usually have the means to buy new cars whenever they choose.

“Overall, I don’t think dealers in Manhattan are going to be as affected compared to dealers in other states or less busy cities, because even in the good economy, bad economy, there’s always going to be somebody who walks in the door to buy a car,” said Mr. Azeez, 24.

In Ann Arbor, Mich., on the strip of auto dealerships west of downtown on Jackson Avenue, customer traffic was pretty normal for a Saturday on the last weekend of the month — typically a busy time.

But a Tesla showroom drew a crowd: some 300 to 400 people gathered to protest the political activities of the company’s chief executive, Elon Musk.

Mr. Musk heads the cost-cutting initiative known as the Department of Government Efficiency, which has eliminated thousands of federal jobs and gutted several government agencies, including the Veterans Affairs Department and the Education Department.

Protesters carried signs calling for Mr. Musk’s firing and urged people to sell their Teslas.

“We’ve got to get some basic common sense back in this country,” said Harold Blake, 73, a retiree who drove 30 miles from Dearborn to participate in the protest.

“It’s so extreme, what’s going on in Washington,” he said. “I’m not taking it lying down.”

Over the course of an hour, no customers crossed the picket line to enter the Tesla showroom.

Protests were taking place at Tesla locations around the world, as part of the so-called Tesla Takedown movement. More than two dozen such demonstrations were scheduled across the United States on Saturday. Others were planned for Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

“I’m terrified for my kids and grandkids for what this world is coming to,” Kathy Sinnes, 67, said while protesting outside a Tesla showroom in Miami and holding a poster that read, “Tesla greed we will not heed.”

It remains unclear how soon prices on new vehicles will rise. Most automakers have enough tariff-free cars and trucks on dealer lots to last 60 to 90 days.

Juan Carlos Fagerlund decided not to wait. He was in a Toyota dealership in North Miami, Fla., to add window tinting to a Prius he had bought this month.

Although he had already been thinking about buying a new car, he said, the potential of higher prices prompted him to speed up his shopping, especially because he wanted a Prius. The car is made in Japan and will be subject to a heavy tariff.

The tariff increase “was not entirely the reason why we purchased in March,” Mr. Fagerlund said. “But it was definitely in our minds.”

Adria Pina, 60, a Dominican immigrant and a New Jersey Transit bus driver who lives in Bayonne, N.J., also decided to move quickly. Sitting in the Hudson Toyota dealership in Jersey City minutes after she bought a new car, she said she felt that she had just dodged a tariff pothole.

“My husband said we got lucky that we got a deal right before the tariffs,” Ms. Pina said. “If we didn’t get this done in time, it would have cost us about $10,000 more. That’s a lot of money.”

Sal Sellers, 57, the general sales manager at Hudson Nissan next door, didn’t seem overly concerned about the looming tariffs, noting that he had been through the pandemic and other serious economic downturns. But that didn’t mean his customers weren’t worried.

“Last week, we had a couple customers walking in saying: ‘You know what, I’m not waiting. I’m going to change my car now before the tariffs hit,’” Mr. Sellers said. “I’d say about 30 percent of my customers said that.”

Outside Chicago, Enzo Costa oversees eight dealerships as director of sales for the family-owned Patrick Dealer Group.

In March, he said, he increased his orders for new cars to top off his inventory before prices rise, and his acquisitions team purchased 30 used vehicles — about three times the usual number.

So far, though, he hadn’t seen a spike in customer traffic. “On a normal Saturday, we set 80 to 100 appointments,” he said. “Today, we have 75.”

He added that his sales team was urging customers considering new cars to come to the showroom. “Everything in inventory is pre-tariff,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about that now. That’s something that is way down the road.”

At Silver Line Auto Group in Queens, which sells used Jeeps, Cadillacs and Mercedeses, many customers are immigrants or other people who have driver’s licenses but not Social Security numbers. Back in December, Silver Line sold 35 cars, but business had crashed since then, said a salesman, Silver Bautista. The company sold just eight cars this month and recently laid off four employees.

Mr. Bautista said he believed that customers were staying away not because of rising prices but because they felt a need to save money.

“They don’t care about tariffs,” Mr. Bautista said. “People are worried about being deported.”

Robert Chiarito, Ryan Hooper, Verónica Zaragovia, Anusha Bayya and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

President Trump on Friday commuted the sentence of Carlos Watson, a co-founder of the now-defunct digital media company Ozy Media, on the day he was set to surrender to prison, three people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Watson was sentenced in December to almost 10 years in prison for trying to defraud investors and lenders by lying about the company’s finances. He was sentenced after a federal jury last summer convicted Mr. Watson and Ozy Media of conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud. The jury also convicted Mr. Watson of identity theft, after a two-month trial during which witnesses detailed an impersonated phone call, fabricated contracts and misleading claims about Ozy’s earnings from 2018 to 2021.

A federal judge had also ordered Mr. Watson and Ozy to pay $96 million in restitution and forfeiture. Mr. Watson and Ozy also no longer have to pay those financial penalties, the people said.

Mr. Watson had pleaded not guilty and continued to assert his innocence up until he was sentenced to 116 months. His commutation was reported earlier by CNBC.

Mr. Watson said in a statement that he was “profoundly grateful to President Trump for correcting this grave injustice.”

Mr. Watson started Ozy in 2013, publishing news articles and newsletters before venturing into podcasts and television productions. The start-up secured commitments from prominent investors at a time when digital publishers, like BuzzFeed and Vice, attracted billions of dollars in investments that largely didn’t pan out.

Throughout the legal proceedings, Mr. Watson denied the fraud allegations. In court, his lawyers argued that his representations to investors had been based on good-faith assessments of Ozy’s finances, and they shifted the blame for any fraudulent activity onto other former Ozy employees. When he took the stand at his trial, Mr. Watson said he had not intentionally inflated revenue estimates, but rather had presented the types of service-based income typical of a “scrappy young company” in its early years.

Mr. Watson, at his sentencing hearing in December, reiterated his stance that the government selectively prosecuted him because he is a Black man.

Samir Rao, the other founder of Ozy, and Suzee Han, a former Ozy chief of staff, pleaded guilty in 2023 to fraud charges and testified against Mr. Watson.

At the heart of the case was a 2021 fund-raising call during which Mr. Rao misled Goldman Sachs employees by impersonating a YouTube executive, as first reported by The New York Times. Prosecutors contended that Mr. Watson had helped set up the call, citing text messages he sent to Mr. Rao that, they claimed, amounted to a script for what to say. Mr. Watson denied any responsibility.

Witnesses also testified that Mr. Watson had misrepresented Ozy’s finances to secure investments, inflating revenue figures and presenting misleading claims of commitments from Oprah Winfrey and Live Nation Entertainment.

Mr. Trump also this week pardoned the three founders of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, who had pleaded guilty in 2022 to violations of the bank secrecy act, one of the people familiar with the matter said, as well as Trevor Milton, who was convicted by a federal jury in 2022 of defrauding investors in the electric truck maker Nikola.

The nation’s legal profession is being split between those that want to fight back against President Trump’s attacks on the industry and those that prefer to engage in the art of the deal.

Two big firms sued the Trump administration on Friday, seeking to stop executive orders that could impair their ability to represent clients. The lawsuits filed by Jenner & Block and WilmerHale highlight how some elite firms are willing to fight Mr. Trump’s campaign targeting those he doesn’t like, while others, like Paul Weiss and Skadden, have cut deals to appease the president.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has issued similarly styled executive orders against firms that he perceives as enemies and threats to national security. The orders could create an existential crisis for firms because they would strip lawyers of security clearances, bar them from entering federal buildings and discourage federal officials from interacting with the firms.

“I am heartened by the fact that Jenner and Wilmer are joining Perkins in pushing back on these illegal executive orders. It shows that capitulation is not the only route,” said Matthew Diller, a law professor and former dean of Fordham University School of Law. “In the long run, it will strengthen their reputations in the market as forceful advocates who stand up for principle, a quality that many clients will value.”

Jenner & Block said in a statement that its suit was intended to “stop an unconstitutional executive order that has already been declared unlawful by a federal court.” A third firm, Perkins Coie, has also sued the Trump administration over the same matter, and had some early success in stopping the executive order.

Jenner & Block also created a website — Jenner Stands Firm — to publicize its filing and to highlight newspaper editorials criticizing the executive orders and comments from law school professors questioning the legality of Mr. Trump’s actions.

On Friday evening, Judge John Bates of Federal District Court in Washington issued a temporary restraining order that bars the Trump administration from punishing Jenner & Block. The judge called the portion of the executive order that criticizes the pro bono legal work the firm does for organizations “disturbing” and “troubling.”

Later Friday, another federal judge in Washington, Richard Leon, issued a temporary restraining order granting WilmerHale most of the relief the firm sought from the executive order against it.

The effort to fight back in a public manner stands in contrast with the way other firms have handled Mr. Trump’s campaign against them.

Also on Friday, Mr. Trump told reporters that the White House had reached a deal with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom that would require the firm to provide $100 million in pro bono legal services to causes he supports. Skadden and Mr. Trump reached a deal after the law firm had reached out behind the scenes to head off the filing of an executive order against it.

“We very much appreciate their coming to the table,” Mr. Trump said.

In a statement, Skadden said, “We engaged proactively with the president and his team in working together constructively to reach this agreement.” The firm added that the agreement “is in the best interests of our clients, our people and our firm.”

Last week, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison announced an agreement in which Mr. Trump rescinded his executive order against the law firm in exchange for its committing to represent clients regardless of their political leanings and pledging $40 million in pro bono legal services to issues Mr. Trump has championed.

Paul Weiss reached its deal within days of Mr. Trump’s executive order after the firm’s chairman, Brad Karp, flew from New York for an Oval Office meeting with the president and some of his staff. Mr. Karp said in an email to the firm that he had moved quickly because Paul Weiss’s big corporate clients were threatened with the “loss of their government contracts and the loss of access to the government” if they stuck with the firm.

Mr. Karp cast the deal as a move to save Paul Weiss, which employs about 2,000 people. He also complained that other law firms had not come out to support Paul Weiss.

But that deal was widely criticized. The firm — which is stocked with Democrats who have opposed Mr. Trump — was seen as bending to the president to protect its bottom line.

“A large part of this are business decisions being made by law firms,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a former prosecutor and a professor at New York Law School who specializes in legal ethics. “These firms are calculating that their clients will feel aligned with their decisions.”

Mr. Trump has been going after big law firms that he contends have “weaponized” the legal system. He is initially targeting law firms that hired lawyers who were once involved in the many investigations of his actions during his first presidential term and his business dealings.

The executive orders have been premised on Mr. Trump’s notion that the law firms’ partisan representations and pro bono work for groups that he disagrees with could pose a threat to national security.

A White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, said in a statement: “Democrats and their law firms weaponized the legal process to try to punish and jail their political opponents. The president’s executive orders are lawful directives to ensure that the president’s agenda is implemented and that law firms comply with the law.”

The suit by Jenner & Block was filed in federal court in Washington, and the firm is asking a judge to step in immediately and stop the executive order, which was leveled against it by Mr. Trump this week. The firm is being represented by Cooley, another law firm. The lawsuit named numerous government agencies and officials as defendants.

WilmerHale filed its lawsuit in the same federal court and is being represented by Paul Clement, a solicitor general during the administration of President George W. Bush.

Jenner & Block and WilmerHale represent some of the nation’s biggest companies, and often deal with regulatory issues before government agencies. Jenner & Block has represented the defense contractor General Dynamics, as well as the entertainment giant Viacom, while one of WilmerHale’s major clients is JPMorgan Chase.

The executive order accused the firm of engaging “in obvious partisan representations to achieve political ends” and claimed the firm “discriminates against its employees based on race and other categories prohibited by civil rights laws, including through the use of race-based ‘targets.’”

The executive orders against both Jenner & Block and WilmerHale focused, in large part, on the work of lawyers with the federal investigation into ties between Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. The investigation was led by a special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, a former director of the F.B.I. who was a partner at WilmerHale.

One of Mr. Mueller’s top assistants on that investigation was Andrew Weissmann, a longtime federal prosecutor and former partner at Jenner & Block.

Both Mr. Mueller and Mr. Weissmann rejoined their firms after the investigation was completed. The lawyers left their firms in 2021. But on the WilmerHale website, there is a page devoted to a lengthy interview with Mr. Mueller, who is normally media-averse, in which he discusses his “remarkable life and career.”

Jenner & Block’s complaint said Mr. Trump’s action was unconstitutional and would compromise the ability of the firm’s more than 500 lawyers to “zealously advocate for its clients.”

The lawsuit noted that Mr. Trump’s deal with Paul Weiss did not include any new security measures imposed on that firm.

In a statement, WilmerHale, which has about 1,000 lawyers, said the president’s executive order “is a plainly unlawful attack on the bedrock principles of our nation’s legal system — our clients’ right to counsel and the First Amendment.”

Perkins Coie, one of the first law firms targeted by Mr. Trump, sued him earlier this month. A federal judge temporarily halted Mr. Trump’s order, saying it was likely illegal and adding: “It sends little chills down my spine.”

Vanita Gupta, a civil rights lawyer and former senior Justice Department official in the Biden and Obama administrations, said the new lawsuits were necessary in a time of peril for the legal profession.

“The only way through this attack on the very foundations of our legal system is by fighting back,” Ms. Gupta said. “If firms want to be trusted to fight the biggest fights, they must not cave to blatantly unconstitutional government actions.”

She praised the three firms that are fighting the administration and said she hoped others would do the same because “collective action is the only way to pull through in this moment.”

Mr. Trump’s executive order against Paul Weiss was motivated in part by the fact that a former partner at that firm has worked with the Manhattan district attorney’s office in trying to build a criminal case against Mr. Trump after he lost the 2020 election.

One pattern of the executive orders is going after law firms that have employed attorneys whom Mr. Trump’s sees as his personal enemies. One of those is Mr. Weissmann, whom Mr. Trump has often lashed out against on his social media platform, Truth Social.

Mr. Weissmann has a reputation as an aggressive investigator. In recent years, he has emerged as a public critic of Mr. Trump, appearing frequently on MSNBC to provide legal analysis about the range of indictments Mr. Trump faced for his conduct.

In the complaint, the firm said Mr. Weissmann had not worked for it since 2021. It also noted that it has had prominent lawyers from all political parties on its staff.

Tyler Pager contributed reporting.