The Bureau of Immigration said it was ready to process thousands of returning overseas Filipinos who are being repatriated from abroad amid the raging COVID-19 pandemic.
Immigration Commissioner Jaime Morente said the BI will always see to it that the number of immigration officers deployed at the international airports is always adequate so that passengers of these repatriation flights are served properly and processed upon their arrival in the country.
“We assure our returning Kababayan, the airlines, airport authorities, and organizers of these repatriation efforts that we have the sufficient manpower to address their needs insofar as conducting immigration formalities for these passengers are concerned,” Morente said.
The BI chief issued the statement after Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. described the ongoing repatriation of overseas Filipinos as the biggest ever in Philippine history.
Locsin even surmised that what is happening could possibly be the “biggest repatriation anywhere, of any country, in the world.”
Statistics cited from Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana indicate that since last year when the pandemic broke out, more than a million Filipinos, mostly overseas contract workers, were already repatriated from various countries.
It has been observed that the last mass repatriation of this magnitude occurred in 1991 during the Gulf War when more than 20,000 to 30,000 were sent home from the Middle East.
Lawyer Carlos Capulong, BI port operations chief, said there has been an upsurge in the number of arriving repatriated Filipinos since the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Infectious Diseases (IATF) recently authorized the different airlines to mount special commercial flights that wouldbring home Filipinos who remain stranded abroad due to the pandemic.
Capulong said the BI continues to operate at full capacity at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) despite the implementation of the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) in Metro Manila.
“Despite the health risks they face, our immigration officers at international ports are making a worthy sacrifice in reporting for duty to ensure that our services to the traveling public are not hampered and interrupted,” the BI official added.
At the same time, BI operatives arrested a total of 28 foreign fugitives from justice during the first semester of the year.
In a report to the Immigration Commissione, the BI’s fugitive search unit (FSU) said that despite the pandemic, they remained active in locating and apprehending alien fugitives hiding in the country.
The number of alien fugitives arrested from January to June was only slightly lower than the 32 wanted foreigners who were apprehended in the same period last year when the pandemic broke out.
“While admittedly we had much difficulty as our field operatives face exposure to virus, our officers remain steadfast in their duty to cleanse the country of these unwanted aliens,” Morente said.
BI FSU Chief Rendel Sy said most of the fugitives arrested were already deported and are now serving sentences for their crimes, adding that the aliens were also placed in the BI blacklist and banned from re-entering the country.
Records showed that 19 South Koreans, who were also wanted for fraud and illegal gambling, topped the list of the arrested fugitives. The rest were four Americans, a Japanese, a French, an Italian, a Polish and a Bahraini.
Among the high profile fugitives who were captured was Frenchman Julien Barbier, who is wanted for narcotics trafficking; American John Dalton Daclan, who is wanted for a string of cases such as robbery, burglary, fraud, and battery; and Italian Antonello Ivaldi, a sex offender and alleged pedophile.
