The Bureau of Immigration (BI) is deporting a 60-year-old American wanted by authorities in Alaska for allegedly abducting his two adolescent children and bringing them to the Philippines.
BI Commissioner Jaime Morente said Leo James Chaplin is now detained at the BI detention facility in Bicutan, Taguig City, following his arrest last Friday inside his boat at the Ocean View Yacht Club in Samal Island, Davao del Norte, by operatives of the bureau’s fugitive search unit (FSU).
Morente said Chaplin will be deported immediately as he was already issued a deportation order by the BI board of commissioners in June last year for being an undesirable and undocumented alien.
“He is also the subject of an arrest warrant issued by a US district court in Alaska for international parental kidnapping,” Morente added.
Chaplin was reportedly accused of abducting his two adolescent children he allegedly brought to the Philippines in November 2014 without their mother’s knowledge and consent.
According to BI intelligence officer and FSU chief Bobby Raquepo, Chaplin last arrived in the country four years ago and had illegally stayed here since April 2017 when his working visa expired.
“He then went into hiding upon learning of the arrest warrant that was issued to him by the Alaska court,” Raquepo said.
A US federal law, the International Parental Kidnapping Crime Act of 1993 (IPKCA) penalizes the act of removing a child from the US or retaining a child outside the US with the intent to obstruct a parent’s custodial rights, or to attempt to do so. It is punishable by up to three years in prison.
Raquepo bared that Chaplin can no longer return to the Philippines upon his deportation as his name was already placed in the BI’s blacklist. (Jun Ramirez)
