WASHINGTON — President Trump’s temporary ban on entry visas for people from seven predominantly Muslim countries has opened fissures across his administration, with bureaucrats struggling to enforce a law they had no warning of, military officers cautioning that it will hurt their partners in conflict zones like Iraq, and diplomats lodging a protest against the message it is sending the world.
Inside the State Department, officials are circulating a so-called dissent cable, which warns that closing the nation’s doors to more than 200 million people to weed out a handful of would-be terrorists will not make the nation safer and might instead deepen the threat.
The memorandum began to take shape late last week, as word of Mr. Trump’s executive order leaked out. The sponsors quickly gathered over 100 signatures, an unusually large number, but a draft of the memo was still being refined over the weekend.
Dissent memos are an established way for diplomats to register objections to American policy.
