MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Foreign Affairs said it brought home 9,981 overseas Filipinos in the first five days of December.
The repatriation streak from December 1 to December 5, the agency said, was its highest five-day total since July 2020.
The nearly 10,000 returned migrant Filipinos pushed the total number of those repatriated by the DFA past 287,000.
A majority of last week's repatriates were from the Middle East, in keeping with a long-running trend. The breakdown is as follows:
- 8,432 from the Middle East
- 843 from Asia and the Pacific
- 706 from Europe
"Five medical repatriations from Bahrain, Japan, Oman, Russia, and Thailand were successfully facilitated by the Department and its foreign service posts," the agency said in its latest bulletin.
"The DFA also assisted in the return of a Filipino family, including two minor children, from Iraq, 11 distressed students from Indonesia, and three undocumented [migrant workers]/trafficking victims from Syria," it added.
— Bella Perez-Rubio