VOLAG

President Joe Biden says his deputies are predicting they will extract up to 65,000 Afghans from Afghanistan.

The taxpayer-funded voluntary agencies (VOLAGs) whose primary purpose is to resettle refugees across the country are publicly whining about the Supreme Court’s travel ban decision handed down on Wednesday.

Only 1,639 refugees were admitted to the United States in April, bringing the total arrivals during the first seven months of FY 2018 to 12,188. At this pace, the Trump administration will admit fewer than 21,000 refugees in FY 2018, the lowest number of annual arrivals since the enabling legislation, the Refugee Act of 1980, was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter.

A March 19 federal court decision requiring taxpayers in Tennessee to fund the federal government’s refugee program ignores a 2012 Supreme Court decision, says Richard Thompson, president of the Thomas More Law Center.

Maine is withdrawing from the federal refugee resettlement program just four days before Election Day, WMTW in Portland reports.

More than 45 percent of the refugees resettled in the United States in FY 2016, 38,556 out of 84,995, were Muslim, according to the Department of State’s interactive website. Of the 12,587 Syrian refugees who were resettled in the United States in FY 2016, more than 99 percent, 12,487, were Muslim.

Taxpayers in the state of Tennessee paid to fly an interpreter fluent in an obscure language spoken in Myanmar (Burma) from North Carolina to Nashville to assist in the defense of a refugee from that country charged with four counts of child abuse.

A revolving door in the Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama has sent millions of dollars in federal funding to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants [USCRI], which is led by two former directors of the Office of Refugee Resettlement [ORR], the federal office that selects the voluntary agencies [VOLAGs] who get lucrative federal contracts to resettle refugees.

The admission comes one month after Breitbart News reported ten recently arrived refugees in Colorado were diagnosed with active tuberculosis (TB). Between 2011 and 2014, 16 out of 7,754 refugees were diagnosed with active TB at the time of their initial medical screening.

This makes Idaho the seventh state to confirm to Breitbart News that recently arrived refugees have been diagnosed with active TB.

“These statistics underscore the urgency [of the public health risk posed by the refugee resettlement program in Tennessee],” Norris tells Breitbart News.

The scientific findings come from the research team headed by Dr. Timothy Rodwell, “an associate professor and physician in the Division of Global Health at UCSD” and one of the top tuberculosis experts in the world. They belie political arguments made by immigration advocates that reporting on the public health risks posed by high rates of latent TB infection (LTBI) among refugees is a “baseless exercise in fear mongering” and “incite[s] a vast overreaction.”

NASHVILLE, Tennessee—Both the Tennessee Department of Health and the VOLAG (voluntary agency) that administers the refugee resettlement program in the Volunteer State, Catholic Charities of Tennessee’s Tennessee Office for Refugees, are failing to make public critical information on refugee tuberculosis (TB) health care.

State Senator Mark Norris (R-Collierville) is sharply rebuking Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam for mischaracterizing the Tennessee General Assembly’s Tenth Amendment lawsuit against the federal government for its operation of the refugee resettlement program to the state’s Attorney General, Herbert Slatery.

The first reported case of a person with measles in the recent Memphis outbreak, which now numbers seven confirmed cases, was at a local mosque on April 15, according to the Shelby County Health Department.

North Dakota is one of fourteen states that have withdrawn from the federal refugee resettlement program. In those states, the Obama administration has hired voluntary agencies [VOLAGs] to continue to resettle refugees under the questionable statutory authority of the Wilson-Fish alternative program.

Don Barnett, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, tells Breitbart News that the federal government’s operation of the refugee resettlement program in Tennessee costs the state more than $165 million each year.

Technology entrepreneur Doug Burgum, one of two candidates for the gubernatorial nomination in North Dakota’s Republican primary, tells Breitbart News that suing the federal government over the refugee resettlement program on Tenth Amendment grounds is “an option that deserves consideration.”

GOP presidential contender Sen. Ted Cruz is pushing his State Refugee Security Act of 2015 (S. 2363), now before the United States Senate for formal consideration.

The constitutional argument is that the federal government, without the permission of these 12 Wilson-Fish states, has “commandeered” state funds by placing refugees in their states, thereby obligating states to pay Medicaid expenses for the refugees, in violation of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The Thomas More Law Center, a well respected public interest law firm, is ready to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the $1 billion a year U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program and is looking for a governor to be the plaintiff in a case that can be filed on short notice.

Though they are officially “non-profit” organizations, Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, and several other Christian organizations are profiting from lucrative contracts with the federal government to resettle refugees in the United States. Of the 100,000 refugees resettled in the United States in 2014 under the Refugee Resettlement program, an estimated 40 percent were Muslims.