Morente vows uninterrupted BI service at Naia and other airports

THE Bureau of Immigration (BI) has assured that its skeletal force would continue serving Filipinos being repatriated from various parts of the world due to the Covid-19 outbreak.

Immigration Commissioner Jaime Morente said the agency’s skeletal work force at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia) continue to report in three shifts to process passengers of repatriation and sweeper flights.

“In the past few days there have been several special and chartered flights that fly in and out of Naia. We assure our stakeholders, especially the different airlines and foreign embassies that our men are always on hand to serve flights 24 hours a day,” Morente said.

The BI chief noted that bulk of the special flights were chartered to ferry Filipinos, mostly overseas contract workers, who were stranded abroad, while there were also several sweeper flights chartered by the different embassies in the Philippines to ferry their citizens stranded due to the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ ).

On Good Friday, over 1,400 Filipinos, all of them seafarers arrived at the Naia and were immediately processed by immigration officers after undergoing health inspection by the Bureau of Quarantine.

Last week, a sweeper flight by Philippine Airlines flew out of the Naia to London with 290 British passengers on board. He added PAL has notified BI that it will be flying three more sweeper flights this week to ferry stranded citizens of Canada and Australia back to their homelands.

Based on the BI’S records, there were 140 flights arrived at the Naia from March 30 to April 8 carrying a total of 11,600 Filipino passengers and 581 foreigners.

On the other hand, there were 126 departure flights for the same period carrying a total of 5,831 foreigners and 1,728 Filipinos.

Morente then compared regular operations to current operations, but stated that he remained hopeful that the disease will be eliminated soon.

“This is a far cry from our regular operations, when we would often need to tap our reserve officers to service the influx of travelers during the Holy Week,” said Morente. “These are indeed different times, but our men remain dedicated to their duties as one of the frontliners in the fight against Covid-19,” he said.