BI denies 500 sex offenders entry to RP
Immigration authorities have barred more than 500 foreign sex offenders from entering the country over the past two and a half years due to the agency’s intensified campaign against child sex tourism. Bureau of Immigration (BI) Commissioner Jaime Morente disclosed that from 2014 up to the present, a total of 514 foreign sex offenders, or pedophiles, were turned back at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA).
Morente said the aliens were intercepted as an offshoot of Operation Angel Watch, a joint initiative of the BI and US government that was launched to prevent American registered sex offenders (RSOs) from entering the Philippines. RSOs pertain to Americans who have been convicted of crimes involving sexual abuse of children and who have finished serving their sentence or were freed under probation.
“This project aims to prevent these sex convicts from entering our borders as they pose a potential threat to Filipino minors whom they might sexually abuse or exploit,” Morente said. It was learned that as a result of the Angel Watch’s success, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently hailed the BI for the noticeable decline in the number of pedophiles who were denied entry at the NAIA.
“For the past three years, the number of UIS registered sex offenders traveling to the Philippines has dramatically decreased directly due to the relentless efforts undertaken by your vigilant Bureau of Immigration Angel Watch team, that denied entry to these child predators and pedophiles,” Juan Bortfield, the DHS’s deputy attaché in Manila, stated in his letter to Morente.
Atty. Ma. Antonette Mangrobang, BI spokesperson, revealed that of the 514 pedophiles who were barred entry from 2014 to 2016, 400 were Americans, 80 were Australians, 29 were Britons, and the remaining five were of varying nationalities. Mangrobang said immigration officers at the NAIA and other ports of entry have been ordered to strictly monitor arriving aliens by ensuring that those who are in the BI’s blacklist of undesirable aliens are apprehended and booked on the first available flight to their port of origin.
