Philippine Ambassador to the United States Jose Manuel Romualdez urged Filipinos illegally staying in the US to leave voluntarily to avoid deportation and perpetual blacklisting, as President-elect Donald Trump is likely to crack down on illegal immigrants as soon as he takes office.
“My advice to many of our fellowmen who are actually still here but cannot get any kind of status, my advice is for them not to wait to be deported,” Romualdez said in a forum of the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (FOCAP) on Friday.
“I can see that the administration of President Trump is really going to be very strict with the immigration policy that he intends to put in place because that is a promise he made to the American public, and that is probably the reason why he won, an issue that is very important to a large number of Americans,” he explained.
Romualdez said that a number of Filipinos have already submitted applications and are waiting for their paperwork to be processed.
He urged other illegal Filipino immigrants, sometimes called “TNTs” or “tago ng tago” [always in hiding], to do the same and consider leaving voluntarily, warning that staying could lead to arrest, deportation and inclusion in an official blacklist – which almost guarantees they can never come back.
The envoy emphasized that taking action now could provide a chance to reapply in the future, encouraging them to “just follow the rules and regulations of the country.”
Romualdez added that some Filipinos in the US share Trump’s stance on strict immigration policies, noting that this perspective motivated some to vote for him.
For these individuals, the issue is personal—they believe everyone should go through the same rigorous process they experienced.
“A lot of them resent the idea that people can just come in here and just be able to go through as if they didn’t go through the difficulty of filing for being a permanent resident. At least this is what I hear from some of the Philippine-American communities that I’ve spoken with,” Romualdez declared.
Unofficial estimates place the number of undocumented Filipino immigrants in the US at between 250,000 to 300,000 individuals.
