OPERATIVES of the Bureau of Immigration’s border control and intelligence unit arrested a Chinese woman wanted in Beijing for alleged involvement in human trafficking last Saturday.
BI intelligence unit chief Fortunato Manahan Jr. said Zheng Yuyu was intercepted by operatives at the NAIA Terminal 2 before she could board a Philippine Airlines flight to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
BI-BCIU deputy chief Joseph Cueto said Zheng has been on the BI’s wanted list since April 9 this year when she and another Chinese named Chen Dongxin were charged with being undesirable aliens.
Cueto said the charges against Zheng and Chen were filed after the Chinese embassy in Manila informed the BI the two are wanted in their country for large-scale human trafficking.
They were accused of allegedly organizing people to illegally and secretly cross China’s territorial borders.
Cueto added that Chen, who remains at large, is an undocumented alien since his Chinese passport has expired.
Zheng is currently being held at the BI’s detention facility in Bicutan, Taguig while the agency is readying her deportation.
Her name will also be included in the immigration blacklist to bar her from entering the country again.
In another development, three more suspected trafficking victims were prevented from leaving the country by immigration officers.
Immigration Commissioner Norman Tansingco said the passengers — two of them women bound for Lebanon and Syria — were intercepted at NAIA’s Terminals 1 and 3 last June 9 and 10 as they were about to board their flights to the Middle East.
Tansingco said immigration officers offloaded the passengers after they admitted the real purpose of their travel during a secondary inspection.
“They all initially alleged they were traveling as tourists and one of them even pretended to be a nanny for the 16-year-old boy who is her supposed companion on her trip,” the BI chief said.
“The fake nanny later confessed that she is not a tourist but would be traveling to Syria to work as a domestic helper,” he added.
Tansingco said another claimed she will go on vacation to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia but later admitted she was going to Lebanon where she had previously worked as a household help.
The third passenger presented a fake Saudi Arabian visa and eventually surrendered her United Arab Emirates visa, saying said she was going to Dubai to work as a maid.
“In all these cases, the victims recounted that they were recruited via social media by illegal recruiters who processed all their travel documents,” Tansingco said. “It is clear that they are all victims of human trafficking, thus we could not allow them to leave.”
The three were turned over to the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking for investigation.
The agency said that from January to February this year, it deferred the departure of 6,788 out of 1,056,247 Filipinos who exited the country.
Of this, 57 were referred to IACAT as likely victims of human trafficking while the rest were deferred for other reasons, such as incomplete, improper or misrepresented documents.
