Tourists weigh suit over pat-downs

A host of Chinese tourists subjected to intensive body searches by federal agents after arriving Saturday morning aboard Shanghai Airlines’ charter flight from China are weighing the prospect of filing a lawsuit over the incident, alleging racial discrimination.

At issue in the tourists’ complaints is an operation led by Drug Enforcement Administration agents upon the arrival of the Shanghai flight at Saipan’s airport Monday. Tour operators report that agents corralled 147 of the 187 passengers on the flight into a small room and searched even the most private parts of their bodies, in addition to searching every piece of checked and carry-on luggage they carried.

Many of the passengers reported feeling violated and some even promised never to return to the CNMI. Travelers have already filed the first of what tourism officials expect will be many complaints over the episode—which resulted in a more than three-hour delay for them at the airport—with Chinese travel agents, according to one hotel operator, and local officials are fearful it will damage the CNMI’s reputation in key Asian market for its struggling tourism industry.

“The Chinese tourists were shocked by the way they were treated without any explanation from the DEA agents,” Century Tours general manager Ronald Chan, a passenger on board the Shanghai flight, said in a statement. “Through my own experience, you can see how the DEA treated us upon arrival.”

Chan reports that after reaching the customs desk at the airport, a DEA agent stopped him without telling him why.

“Then he isolated me in a small room … and asked me to face the wall and put my hands up on the wall,” Chan said. “He then proceeded to frisk me up and down my body—I was so shocked by what was happening—which included him touching my private parts three times. I must emphasize that he never asked me or would tell me what was going on.”

Among the passengers, only the Chinese tourists saw this kind of scrutiny, he added, and some are now poised to file suit over the incident.

“Some of them complained that the agents inserted their hands between the tourist’s underwear and their body,” said Chan. “The tourists were visibly insulted by all of this and are going to consult an attorney to seek a complaint regarding violations of their human rights and race discrimination. This search and treatment by the agents was only carried out on the Chinese tourists.”

However, a leading DEA agent in Guam in an interview Wednesday said the airport searches seen on Saturday are commonplace on America’s mainland and an integral part of the agency’s efforts to intercept narco-traffickers. The operation was also conducted well within the DEA’s legal authority, he added, and international travelers are often subjected to far more intensive treatment in other nations.

“This is nothing new,” said Antonio Marquez, the agent in charge of the DEA’s Guam Resident Office, adding that the agency has conducted such searches throughout the United States for more than 30 years. “As we are picking it up on Guam doing this, we’re going to be doing the same thing [in the CNMI].”

Marquez took issue with the suggestion that passengers were selected for the searches based on race and noted that although the searches found no illegal drugs, early reports suggest some contraband items such as illegal plant and animal products were intercepted during the operation.

“There was nobody specifically targeted, absolutely not,” said Marquez. “We don’t intentionally do that. My agents and task force officers are professionals. I think [the accusations] are because of the fact that people just are not used it.”

Narcotics smugglers, he added, often attempt to bring drugs across borders on flights that arrive in the early hours of the morning in a bid to catch customs officials off guard and searches like those on Saturday are critical to curbing the flow of crystal methamphetamine into the CNMI.

“For over 20 years, ice has devastated these islands,” he said. “There was no bad intent. We’re just trying to do our jobs.”

Meanwhile, the tourism industry in the CNMI is already seeing the initial blowback over the searches from Chinese visitors. Tom Liu, one of the proprietors of the Tinian Dynasty Hotel and Casino, a resort that caters to many Chinese tourists, said complaints from travel agents are beginning to surface as some of the passengers who were on board the flight have returned to China. Liu noted the incident could harm the CNMI’s image as a travel destination there.

“We are concerned about the reaction from the tourists and the travel agencies,” he said. “What if they decide not to promote the CNMI?”