Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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English
Photo Credit: 台大企鵝/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
NATIONAL TAIWAN UNIVERSITY (NTU) students protested earlier this month against the National Immigration Agency (NIA) for entering the NTU campus to arrest a migrant worker.
During the incident, a 31-year-old Vietnamese woman was taken into custody by the NIA. Before this took place, however, a cyclist who was a Taiwanese national was detained by the officers, who were in plainclothes and did not produce identification. The group consisted of one NIA officer and three labor officials. The cyclist was attempting to leave the area where the NIA was searching, by a student cafeteria.
During the incident, these plainclothes officers demanded the man’s ID and scanned his face without consent, but after confirming that the man was a Taiwanese national, the NIA did not explain their actions and continued searching.
The incident points to a larger pattern of wrongdoing by the NIA and Taiwanese police, in which random searches and detentions are carried out when searching for migrant workers who have illegally left their workplaces–-sometimes referred to as “runaway” migrant workers. This was particularly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic.
One well-known incident was in 2021, when the New Taipei police arrested and detained a migrant worker who was taking out the trash, on the basis of suspicion of her being a “runaway”. The worker in question did not have her ID on her, as she was only taking out the garbage, and had simply stepped out of her home for a few moments. But this led the police officer to conclude that she was a runaway migrant worker and to arrest her.
Although this migrant worker next tried to find a photo of her ID on her phone, this was to no avail, and the police officer instead took her phone away. Subsequently, she was handcuffed to a 7/11 stool and brought to the Zhongxing Bridge Police Station in Sanchong, where she was placed in leg shackles and interrogated. When police found her to be in Taiwan legally and released her, she did not have any money on her, so she was unable to take a taxi and had to walk back using Google Maps.
After the incident, the migrant worker decided to report the incident, and was accompanied by her employer to the police station. Police are accused of attempting to hinder her and her employer when they then attempted to file a report, making the process unnecessarily long, and keeping them at the police station past 1 AM.
In another incident that occurred the same year, a Taiwanese music teacher surnamed Chan in Zhongli, was stopped by police on suspicion of being a runaway migrant worker and asked to provide ID. When Chan declined to respond to what she felt were intrusive police questions, she was body-slammed by police, handcuffed, and brought to a station for questioning.
After Chan demanded that video of the incident be released, police released a partial video of Chan being questioned, which ends before Chan was body slammed and detained. Police declined to release video of Chan handcuffed or being interrogated.
Migrant worker advocates have pointed to this and other incidents as illustrating a pattern of arbitrary detentions by the Taiwanese police. Police are sometimes quick to resort to violence against migrants, as evidenced in videos that emerged in the past of police arresting migrant workers in Zhongli with chokeholds, or the shooting death of 27-year-old Vietnamese migrant worker Nguyen Quoc Phi with nine bullets in 2017, after which he was left to bleed out and died.
Still, one notes that many industries in Taiwan have already become reliant on a population of migrant workers who have usually left their original employment. This includes the agriculture industry and forestry industry, and some aspects of the hospitality industry. This should also be visible in the recent arrest, in which the arrested individual appeared to work at NTU.