Before they left Britain in 2020, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, weathered a storm of threats and digital abuse. A former top police official once described their safety risks as “disgusting and very real.”

Such threats made security a paramount issue for the couple once they announced this week that they are returning to live in Britain. Their safety had been at the heart of the fallout from their original decision to leave the country, when the government withdrew their publicly funded, armed security after they stepped down from their royal roles.

The pair have said the decision put them in danger, and it became a bitter flashpoint in their rupture with the royal family. Harry at one point even claimed the move was a plot to keep him in Britain.

The couple have not said what kind of arrangements they have made for their protection upon their return, expected this month. But the kind of security they had access to while living in California for the past few years is not possible in Britain without government resources.

While armed private security is legal and ubiquitous in the United States, guns are tightly restricted in Britain. Even top American law enforcement officials such as F.B.I. agents must get permission from the government to carry firearms in Britain.

Still, an unarmed detail is relatively common among Britons who use private security, said Chris Phillips, a former senior British counterterrorism official.

“There are lot of people over here that have security, and they are not armed,” he said.

As for Harry, he added, “There are going to be threats to him. There is no doubt about it.”

Harry’s and Meghan’s return to Britain comes at a time when they are unpopular with the British public, and news coverage of their security has emphasized comments from Britons saying they do not want the government to pay for it.

The armed details that the government provides are stretched thin, officials have warned, in part because of a high number of protectees. Britain has a record nine living former prime ministers who get round-the-clock security.

Prime ⁠Minister Andy Burnham refused to wade into the royal saga on Thursday when questioned by reporters, declining to say who would foot the bill for protecting Harry, Meghan and their two children, Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5.

“This is a private matter,” Mr. Burnham said. “It’s a ⁠matter for Harry and ⁠for Meghan, and ⁠we wish ⁠them well in the moves that they are ⁠making.”

As Harry and Meghan split with the royal family in 2020, questions over their safety arose as part of a larger debate over their expectations about a post-royal life.

At the time, a committee responsible for some security decisions in Britain decided that the couple would no longer be eligible for the police protection typically given to royal family members.

The committee, known as Ravec, is made up of government and police officials and members of the royal household. It is responsible for making security arrangements for the royal family and other figures put at risk by terrorism or other threats.

Harry challenged the decision, and at a hearing in 2022 said he would “reimburse or proactively finance the cost of the security measures.” But Ravec decided it was not right for wealthy people to be able to rent armed police from the government.

Harry has said that his family needed full-time armed protection when visiting Britain, where his father, King Charles III; brother, William, next in line for the throne; and other relatives live. In court, his lawyers revealed threats to his safety and described “additional layers of racism and extremism” that they said were fueling the abuse.

Harry lost part of that legal challenge in 2023, and a judge dismissed his case the following year, but he appealed. In April 2025, Harry’s lawyers argued before England’s Court of Appeal that the decision to withdraw protection violated official policy. The court ruled against him.

Separately, the Ravec committee had planned to review security arrangements in Britain for the family. The panel is independent but overseen by the Home Office. A decision has been delayed because the government had to deal with protecting an “unprecedented nine former prime ministers at once,” The Times of London reported last month.

The Home Office said in an emailed statement on Thursday, “It is our longstanding policy not to provide detailed information on those arrangements, as doing so could compromise their integrity and affect individuals’ security.”

In a BBC interview in May 2025, Harry said that he hoped to finally reconcile with his family. He and the king had fallen out over the security withdrawal. Charles was diagnosed with cancer in 2024.

But Harry was clear about the dangers to his family. “I can’t see a world in which I would bring my wife and children back to the U.K. at this point,” he told the BBC.

He said the last “sticking point” in a return to Britain was security, spurring questions about the turnaround and whether the contentious issue has since been resolved.

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President Trump has opened a new front in his campaign to intimidate political foes, threatening a prominent liberal think tank with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit over a report concluding that his deployment of the National Guard to cities across the country has had little effect on reducing violent crime.

The threats against the think tank, the Center for American Progress, were Mr. Trump’s latest effort to use the legal system to punish critics for voicing unflattering facts and opinions generally protected by the First Amendment. And while it is unclear how far any suit the president might ultimately file will get in court, it could force the organization to spend money fighting it off and make it even more of a target of his allies and supporters.

On Monday, one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Alejandro Brito, wrote a letter to the center warning that he would file the suit if the group did not fully retract the report, which was published on its website on July 13. The letter, viewed by The New York Times, was addressed to the group’s president and chief executive, Neera Tanden, a longtime Democratic official who served as a senior adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and to several of its board members.

Mr. Brito claimed that the report about the National Guard was full of malicious and false statements. He gave Ms. Tanden and members of her board until 5 p.m. on Friday to retract it and apologize to Mr. Trump.

Ms. Tanden pushed back, saying in a statement that the center would “neither cower nor bend in the face” of legal action. She also defended the report, asserting that while its findings might have been “inconvenient to the Trump administration,” they were “grounded in rigorous, evidence-based research and analysis.”

“This threatened lawsuit’s attack on facts and evidence is baseless,” she added. “A fundamental protection of the First Amendment is to allow for the publication of facts and analysis that is contrary to the arguments and claims of any administration. A lawsuit is a transparent attempt to silence us.”

Mr. Trump has often lashed out at scholars and commentators for reproaching or critiquing him in the news media. And since winning re-election, he has filed a flurry of lawsuits against news organizations like the BBC and The Times, claiming they defamed him. He has even filed suit against the Des Moines Register, arguing that a poll the paper published before the 2024 election indicating that he would lose the vote in Iowa amounted to consumer fraud and election interference.

(The Times has filed its own suits against the administration, including two seeking increased access for its reporters at the Pentagon.)

The president has repeatedly claimed that his administration is the most transparent in American history. But he and his aides have used lawsuits and executive actions to go after law firms, universities and television networks. They have also used criminal tactics such as search warrants and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to pry loose sensitive information from reporters.

Many of these efforts have faltered once they reached court and faced judicial scrutiny. Mr. Brito himself has filed multiple failed suits on behalf of Mr. Trump. Last month, a federal judge in Florida referred Mr. Brito for potential disciplinary proceedings after ruling that a suit he filed for the president against the Internal Revenue Service amounted to an improper exercise in self-dealing.

The Center for American Progress report accused Mr. Trump of seeking to take credit for a nationwide decline in violent crime that began before he returned to the White House. The report determined that there was “no evidence” that the National Guard deployments had affected the crime rate, adding that they were poised to cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion if they continued through the end of 2026.

The report asserted that the “primary goal” of the deployments was “never to stop crime.” Instead, it said they amounted to “a dangerous power grab by the Trump administration.”

The team that put the report together used an analysis based on homicide, violent crime and gun victimization data in cities where the National Guard was deployed — Washington, Los Angeles and Memphis — over the period from January 2023 to this February.

“This approach was employed to identify any statistical changes in crime trends associated with the deployment of the National Guard in specific cities,” its authors wrote.

Mr. Trump referred to the report on social media last week after watching a television segment about the report, which he described as “another Radical Left SCAM.” In the post, he threatened to sue the center and several of its funders, including the liberal financier George Soros, who has long served as a boogeyman for the administration.

A week later, Mr. Brito’s letter arrived at the center, saying that the president would sue if Ms. Tanden and her colleagues did not retract the report, issue an apology and give Mr. Trump unspecified financial compensation.

The letter ended with an all-caps salutation: “PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELVES ACCORDINGLY.”

On Friday, a lawyer for the center fired back in a letter of his own, deriding Mr. Trump’s accusations that he had been defamed.

“This is utterly absurd,” the lawyer, Kevin H. Metz, wrote to Mr. Brito. “Truth is not and cannot be defamation.”

Mr. Metz went on to say that the center welcomed the opportunity to make its case in court and receive more information on the National Guard deployments through the process of discovery.

Other think tanks of various political stripes have rallied to the center’s side.

“Independent organizations across the ideological spectrum must be free to express their analysis and opinions, and to challenge those in power without fear of political retaliation or legal intimidation,” said Peter Goettler, the president and chief executive of the libertarian Cato Institute. “Disagreements on matters of policy should be settled through open inquiry, evidence, and debate — not threats designed to silence criticism.”

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