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ResourcesVisa & Immigration LawVisa NewsNationwide Immigration Raids Continue in Thailand

Nationwide Immigration Raids Continue in Thailand

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing yet again, immigration raids here in the Kingdom.

I wanted to make this with video, not particularly just as an update on some of the raids that have occurred in the past few weeks, but more notable to me is the fact that these raids seem to be occurring in a more nationwide scope and scale. This I think it's especially notable in light of the fact that we have had a new Immigration Chief appointed and I think he is serious about implementing tighter immigration policies nationwide. In the past we would often see a lot of these reports coming from areas that were more the tourist kind of places or I should say the usual suspects if you will, with respect to location. Now you are starting to see, in my opinion, it is kind of broadening out to occurring in perhaps not the most notable places that such raids could occur.

Two articles of note on this issue: one was published 24 October, 2018 from the Bangkok Post, www bangkokpost.com. Headline: Cambodians, Chinese Caught in Immigration Raids in Tak. Quoting directly, "40 Cambodians and 20 Chinese Nationals were arrested for immigration offences during raids in Mae Sot District on Wednesday morning. Teams comprising Immigration officers, Tourist police, local police and officials searched 6-7 locations in the Border District. 10 of the 60 arrested had overstayed their visa for many years."

Another article which also was published October 24th, 2018 in the Nation. That is nationmultimedia.com. The article's title is, Over 1,000 Officers "X-ray" same Number of Foreigners in Pathumthani.  "x-ray" in quotation marks referring to “Operation x-ray Outlaw Foreigner” which is the operation that commenced many of these raids to begin with some months ago. Quoting directly from this article, "Acting Immigration Police Chief General Surachate Hakpan on Wednesday led some 1,000 officers to "x-ray" 25 locations in Pathumthani's Klong Luang District.” Quoting further, “Surachate said “Operation X-ray Outlaw Foreigners” was part of the Government's policy for the Army, Police and Administrators to crackdown on transnational criminals throughout Thailand.

I urge those who are interested in this to go check out both of those articles as they are very noteworthy and they've got a lot of interesting information. I just wanted to bring this up because as noted previously these raids continue in earnest and I do believe you geographically they're sort of fanning out a little bit more  I think we're going to continue seeing them. I think they're going to be more diverse in what they're looking for now at this point I think you can see that by the different areas that they're now looking at with respect over stayers and illegal entrants. As things change we will go ahead and update you as things progress.