Man Arrested After Jumping White House Fence

WASHINGTON — A man carrying a backpack jumped over a fence and got within several steps of the White House before being arrested late Friday night, the Secret Service said. The intrusion, the first reported in the 51 days since President Trump took office, came as the president was inside the residence.

A Secret Service official said that the intruder did not pose a threat to Mr. Trump. But the breach was more serious than most other cases of fence-jumping at the White House: The man was able to elude multiple layers of security before being stopped near the entrance at the South Portico.

The Secret Service has not identified the man, though it said that he was not armed, and that his backpack did not contain any hazardous materials.

The “Secret Service did a fantastic job last night,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Saturday at a meeting of cabinet members at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va. He described the intruder as a “troubled person.”

In a statement, the Secret Service said that at about 11:38 p.m. on Friday, “an individual scaled the outer perimeter fence by the Treasury Building and East Executive Avenue,” adding, “Secret Service Uniformed Division officers arrested the individual on the south grounds without further incident.”

The man had no criminal record and no history with the Secret Service, the official said. Officers searched the north and south grounds of the White House and found nothing else amiss. The Homeland Security secretary, John F. Kelly, was briefed about the episode.

Security at the White House became a major issue in 2014, when there were several cases in which intruders scaled the fence and entered the grounds. In one episode, a man who was carrying a knife, Omar J. Gonzalez, managed to overpower a Secret Service agent inside the North Portico entrance and run through the ceremonial East Room before he was tackled.

The Secret Service came under criticism because in its initial account of the episode, officials indicated that Mr. Gonzalez had made it only steps inside the North Portico after running through the door. The fuller account emerged from Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah and the chairman of a subcommittee that investigated the breach.

In a more lighthearted case that year, a toddler squeezed through the iron bars on the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the complex.

The National Capital Planning Commission recently approved plans for the Secret Service to install a stronger and higher perimeter fence around the White House. In 2015, the Secret Service added spikes to the top of the existing fence on the north and south sides of the White House grounds as a temporary deterrent to jumpers.