As part of the fight against human trafficking, the government’s immigration office will restart at least four cell phone jammers at Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA). The Bureau of Immigration (BI) announced on Wednesday that all immigration areas of the country’s international airports will have similar jammers installed, each costing 400,000 pesetas.
Ronald Ledesma, the official in charge of immigration, said the jammer was a tool to stop airport trafficking. Ledesma added that the human trafficking group uses mobile phones with its intended victims. An immigration official who declined to be named told GMANews.TV: “The usual target of traffickers is Filipino workers holding overseas tourist visas. The so-called tourist workers.” “Mobile phones will be used to target the target victim or victim to a specific Queues or counters,” immigration officials said. “These mobile phone portable jammer will undoubtedly make a huge contribution to combating human trafficking,” Ledesma emphasized.
The mission of the property department of the office is to obtain the necessary approval from the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) to enable the NAIA radio jammer to be up and running as soon as possible. John Tugade, head of BI’s real estate department, said the four jammers in the office and his server are still in the NAIA departure area and can be used at any time. After airlines and other airport participants protested the disruptors, BI stopped using equipment purchased from the agency during the previous government. In view of the increase in reported cases of Filipino transactions abroad, the use of jammers is one of the various measures planned by BI and the Inter-Agency Committee to Combat Trafficking. The Council is a government agency under the supervision of the Ministry of Justice. It is responsible for monitoring the implementation of Law No. 9208 or the 2003 Anti-Human Trafficking Act. In September, BI began testing the new “S-Line” queuing system at NAIA to prevent passengers from choosing the immigration switch. The S-Line system puts arriving and departing passengers in a situation where they cannot choose the airport’s immigration counter because they will be assigned to different counters through a serpentine line.