A local citizen put up a billboard to protest the resettlement of Islamic refugees in his community, only to be forced to take it down by the threat of a lawsuit over its alleged inaccuracy.  WND reports:

Sources tell WND that Catholic Charities threatened to sue [the] billboard owner…. The local Catholic Charities office in St. Cloud complained that the sign was inaccurate because their particular branch of the Catholic organization has not placed any Muslim refugees in St. Cloud.

That’s technically correct. It’s actually Lutheran Social Services that has been paid by the federal government to bring Muslims to St. Cloud. But Catholic Charities is not off the hook when it comes to statewide resettlements of Muslims in Minnesota…   “It is accurate that Catholic Charities of St. Paul and Minneapolis do resettle Somali Muslims in the state,” [refugee watchdog Ann] Corcoran says.

Refugee resettlement in Minnesota has been so huge that on Super Tuesday this year, one caucus location gave all the candidates’ speeches in Somali and not English.  More than two dozen of these Somalis have left Minnesota since 2007 to go fight for Islamist groups such as al-Shabab in Somalia and the Islamic State, according to the FBI.  Somali refugees in the U.S. have been convicted by the dozens of providing funding and other support to terrorist groups.

The United States takes the lion’s share of the world’s refugees, far more than any other nation.  The State Department imports refugees into local communities with minimal input from local governments, preferring to work through its paid contractors.  In 2014, State took testimony on its refugee programs only electronically, and has not made the content of that testimony available to the American public.

Tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars a year are at stake for each of the major groups contracted to resettle Muslim refugees in America.  They have a vested interest in keeping the money flowing.  Top salaries at these contracting firms are always in the six-figure range, and approach a half-million dollars a year.  The federal government pays its contractors $1,950 for every refugee.

Federal contractors are also paid millions in government grants in return for making services available to the refugees.  For those cities identified as “preferred communities,” grants can be substantial — but not to the cities that need to cope with an unexpected overload on their health departments and education systems.  Mostly, these extra funds go to the Federal contractors directly.  The effects of these moves are opaque to the American people, as the State Department’s office turns in its reports to Congress years behind the lawfully required schedule.

A Federal contractor using the threat of lawsuits to silence criticism raises the question of whether the First Amendment is being violated.  Catholic Charities are not acting here as a genuinely independent agent that might be slandered, but as an arm of the US Federal government.  As such, the suppression of criticism under color of law seems deeply illegitimate.