SAN DIEGO (AP) — U.S. immigration authorities have canceled the visas of more than two dozen people, including some who worked on a Disney Cruise Line ship, amid allegations that they possessed or had viewed child sexual abuse images.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement Friday that authorities boarded eight cruise ships in late April and determined that 27 people, mostly from the Philippines, were involved in “the receipt, possession, transportation, distribution, or viewing” of child sexual abuse images.
The agency canceled the visas of those involved and returned them to their home countries, the statement said.
The agency did not say if any passengers aboard the ships were believed to be victims. It also did not say which ships agents boarded, why those ships were targeted or where the operations took place. The statement said no additional information was available.
At least some of the ships had docked in San Diego.
Disney Cruise Line in a statement said the company has a “zero-tolerance policy for this type of behavior and fully cooperated with law enforcement. While the majority of these individuals were not from our cruise line, those who were are no longer with the company.”
Immigrant and workers’ rights groups said they had been trying, without success, to obtain information about the status of the workers and the reason behind the enforcement action. Benjamin Prado, with one of the groups, Unión del Barrio, said they held a news conference Tuesday in San Diego after previously receiving a generic statement from Customs and Border Protection.
The statement the agency subsequently released to news organizations this week did not appear to be on the agency’s website, he said. That information should be readily accessible, he said.
Prado said his group wants to better understand what kind of monitoring or surveillance might have been occurring ahead of the workers being detained and whether due process rights were followed. He acknowledged skepticism around information released by agencies like Customs and Border Protection.
“At this point, we doubt, we question their claims and so we do want to follow up with some of these workers to find out exactly what took place,” Prado said.
Customs and Border Protection has said that a criminal charge is not required for someone’s visa to be revoked.