To relieve overcrowding in detention centers for illegal immigrants, the Cabinet has mapped out a three-stage, six-year expansion plan to relocate illegal Chinese immigrants from temporary shelters at police stations and Coast Guard Administration facilities to larger detention centers.
According to a Cabinet official who asked not to be named, the Cabinet hopes to relocate the 1,200 illegal Chinese immigrants staying in temporary shelters across the country to two facilities in Ilan County, Lotung and Tongshan, by the end of the year.
"The all-male shelter in Lotung, which accommodates 244 illegal immigrants, started to take in female immigrants on Tuesday and is expected to accommodate 700 women by the end of the month, when the first-phase of the expansion plan is scheduled to be completed," the official said. "The 244 male immigrants have relocated to a 280-person shelter in Tongshan, which will be expanded to an 880-person facility."
The second phase of the pro-ject involves expanding Lotung to accommodate 900 women.
By 2006, the Cabinet hopes to expand the capacity of the two facilities combined to accommodate 2,200 people, up from 524 now.
In addition to the centers in Ilan, the government operates a 820-person facility in Hsinchu for women and another center in Matsu.
As of the end of July, the facility in Hsinchu had 850 residents, most of whom had been there for more than six months. A new facility, which can accommodate 2,400 people, is scheduled to be completed in 2009 and become operational in 2010, marking the end of the third stage of the expansion project.
The number of illegal female Chinese immigrants has increased more than tenfold over the past four years. While women smuggled from China made up 7 percent of all illegal Chinese immigrants in 1999, the figure had rocketed to 73.3 percent by July this year.
The government has been forced to provide more accommodation for illegal immigrants because of difficulties in repatriating them.
Illegal immigrants are transported back to China once a month under an agreement reached between the Red Cross agencies on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The Cabinet hopes to increase the frequency to once every 20 days.
About 150 people are repatriated on each trip, totalling about 1,800 a year. However, up to 2,000 illegal Chinese immigrants are caught every year.
This year the situation seems to have improved slightly, with 1,100 immigrants entering detention facilities and 1,530 returning to China, according to the Coast Guard Administration.
Nevertheless, the relocation project has gained urgency since August, when six Chinese women drowned after they were thrown from two Taiwanese boats that were being chased by the coast guard in waters off Miaoli County.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching