Official says NPA works against NIA

The National Police Agency (NPA) is "conspiring" with local-level law enforcement to sabotage the newly formed National Immigration Agency (NIA) amid cut-throat turf wars, NIA Deputy Director Steve Wu (吳學燕) told the Taipei Times yesterday.

Wu made the comments following a Friday raid by prosecutors on the agency's task force branch offices in Taoyuan and Ilan counties investigating suspected collusion with human trafficking rings.

According to Taoyuan District Prosecutors' Office spokesman John Chang (張進豐) yesterday, Tsai tung-lung (蔡東龍), who runs a foreign labor brokerage firm, was suspected of providing the NIA's Taoyuan County task force officer Hou Yung-hung (侯永弘) and NIA Ilan County task force official Tsai Chung-kuei (蔡忠貴) with the names and whereabouts of foreign laborers violating the terms of their labor permits.

Workers violating their labor contracts are supposed to be repatriated and their employers fined.

Hou and Tsai Chung-kuei are suspected of demanding NT$40,000 (US$1,200) to NT$100,000 per worker from employers in return for ignoring violations and disregarding fines, Chang said.

Prosecutors added that Hou and his colleagues also protected Tsai tung-lung and rings suspected of trafficking illegal workers.

"After questioning 10 immigration officials, one police officer, and four individuals from foreign labor brokerage firms on Friday, the Taoyuan District Court yesterday ordered the detention of Hou and Tsai tung-lung," Chang said yesterday. "The rest were released on bail."

Friday's raids on the offices and homes of Hou and Tsai Chung-kuei followed six months of NPA-initiated wire taps on the two, Wu said yesterday.

He added that prosecutors and the NPA -- from which Hou and Tsai Chung-kuei had transferred to from the immigration agency in January -- never informed the immigration agency that it had inherited two officers who were under investigation.

"We were completely in the dark until the raid," Wu said.

"The NPA unloaded all their dirty cops on us and didn't tell us about it," he added.

Worse yet, he said, the immigration agency still has "20 or so" more officers who it doesn't know are currently under investigation for collusion with traffickers. That's because the keeper of such information -- the NPA -- refuses to pass it on to the immigration agency, preferring instead to watch immigration authorities fall flat on their face, Wu said.

"It's a conspiracy," he added.

Inaugurated on Jan. 2, the immigration agency this year subsumed the Bureau of Immigration under the NPA, as well as other law enforcement agencies and personnel with immigration-related duties.

An anonymous source from the immigration agency's Taipei task force headquarters yesterday said the Ministry of the Interior, under which the NIA and NPA enjoy equal authority, had decided to transfer "foreign affairs police" such as Hou to the NIA during its formation.

Meanwhile, the NPA, decided against telling its new partner under the interior ministry which police were likely to be crooked so that it could organize raids against the NIA and plunge it into controversy at will, Wu alleged.

"The press release we sent out [yesterday] wasn't the whole truth; the truth is there are turf wars raging between us and the NPA right now," Wu told the Taipei Times yesterday.

The immigration agency's successful bust of a major human trafficking ring in Taoyuan last month had angered the NPA, which had been working on the same case, Wu said.

The police agency was enraged that the bust was credited to immigration authorities while pressure from the Cabinet to crack down on trafficking mounts, he added, referring to the quota doled out by Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) to the NPA, the NIA, the Coast Guard and other agencies for cracking down on human trafficking rings.

This year, the NIA must bust at least five such rings while the NPA is charged with dismantling 20, according to NIA Director Wu Chen-chi (吳振吉) earlier this year.

When asked to respond, the director of the NPA's Public Relations Office Chen Kuo-en (陳國恩) told the Taipei Times yesterday that the NPA did not know whether or not Hou and others were involved in alleged corruption when they applied to transfer to be immigration officials when the NIA was established early this year.