The Bureau of Immigration issued a report this week saying they have barred over 500 foreign sex offenders from entering the Philippines over the past two and a half years.
The bureau issued the report saying their efforts to stop child sex tourism from 2014 to present had assisted in stopping a total of 514 offenders.
Of the group, all were turned away at NAIA. Officials said that the foreigners were intercepted as an offshoot of ‘Operation Angel Watch,’ a join initiative of the Bureau of Immigration and the United States government when they launched the American registered sex offenders list.
That list helped identify those convicted of crimes involving sexual abuse of children. The same list also posted those who had served their time, or had been released on probation.
Officials at the Bureau of Immigration said, “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.”
The Department of Homeland Security recently credited the Bureau of Immigration as the result of the ‘Angel Watch’ success it had within the country.
That recognition cited the major decline in the number of pedophiles and sex offenders who did not slip past NAIA officials.
“For the past three years, the number of US 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 BI.
Of the 514 stopped at the airport, 400 were American, 80 were Australian, 29 were British, and the remaining five were from various countries.