Chinese tourists outraged after DEA body searches

Nearly 200 Chinese tourists arriving on Shanghai Airlines’ recently launched charter service to Saipan were outraged Saturday morning after security staff subjected many of them to body searches as part of an operation initiated by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Staff with a travel company, Century Tours, have reported that after one of the Shanghai-to-Saipan flights touched down around 2am Saturday, customs agents corralled scores of passengers one by one into a private room where they received an intensive body search that included their “private parts” and every piece of checked and carry-on luggage. The searches resulted in a three-and-a-half-hour delay upon their arrival and angered many.

“Some of the tourists were yelling at our tour guides as soon as they came outside of the arrival area with comments like ‘What kind of place is this! I will never come here again!’” a Century Tours staffer said. “One lady told me that they even reached ‘inside my hair, look at my hair now,’ which was messy. Most of the tourists were scared and wanted to know why they were being disrespected by the customs agents.”

In an interview Monday, DEA agent Daniel Holcomb disclosed the searches were part of a drug interdiction effort the agency has long had in place at the nation’s airports. Such mass searches are conducted less frequently on Saipan, he noted, due to a shortage of time and manpower.

“It’s basic interdiction work,” he said, adding that the Shanghai flight was randomly selected and that the searches found nothing. “People should expect to see us at the airport because that is part of our job.”

DEA searches at the local airport are often linked to confidential tips that illegal drugs are on board an arriving aircraft but in the case of the new Shanghai flights, the agency may have a desire to monitor the newly started service, according to Jesus Muña, director of the CNMI’s Division of Customs Service.

“There was no particular reason why they did that, just that, I would assume, it was the airline’s second flight from Shanghai and they were doing a random check,” he said. “They’re just making sure that we are secure and that the people who we are bringing in are okay for us.”

However, local tourism officials are now pursuing talks with the agencies involved in Saturday’s searches in a bid to prevent such incidents from happening again. Perry Tenorio, managing director of the Marianas Visitors Authority, said the searches could damage the CNMI’s reputation in China, adding that some Chinese government officials were traveling on the flight.

“Obviously, this is not a good start for their arrival on the island,” he said. “The information we have on how these tourists were handled gives us the sense that a lot of them felt violated. We’re trying to get together with the agencies involved to prevent something like this from happening again.”