Vox challenges the PP of Burgos with an order to control the registration of immigrants

The alliance between PP and Vox in the Burgos City Council (175,000 inhabitants), where they govern together, has experienced a confrontation over a plan by the ultras for the Local Police to monitor the “registration of illegal immigration.” The Councilor for Citizen Security, Ignacio Peña, and the vice mayor, Fernando Martínez-Acitores, both from the ultra party, publicly announced on Wednesday, at a press conference, that they were going to give this instruction to the agents, ordering them to carry out “periodic inspections and “home visits” to check that in the homes of migrants everyone present has the correct documentation. They also announced that an “anonymous complaints” mailbox would be created for citizens to report suspicious cases. Hours later, the PP, which occupies the mayor’s office, disavowed Peña and Martínez-Acitores in a statement in which it called the measures mere “proposals” and stressed that they still had to be debated in plenary and, above all, that some of them They are not “municipal jurisdiction” but rather the Ministry of the Interior. The Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration has charged this Thursday against what it considers a “clearly xenophobic” initiative.

Peña and Martínez-Acitores outlined the proposal before journalists on Wednesday, in a municipal space with the corporation’s logos. Surveillance measures would include, they said, “periodic inspections and home visits” to “detect possible cases of illegal immigration registration.” The vice mayor explained that in this way the Local Police would collaborate with municipal social services and other groups related to migrants “to share relevant information and coordinate efforts in the detection and prevention of illegal registrations.”

The councilors also indicated that an “anonymous complaint” mailbox would be opened so that citizens could report these possible irregular cases and for the Local Police to act on them. If so, they said, “the necessary measures will be taken to correct the situation and punish those responsible.” The order proposed by the extreme right includes requesting the Administrations involved to cancel “any type of social assistance for those people who have entered illegally or are in Burgos in a situation of illegal registration.”

A few hours passed until, amid a media stir, the PP released a statement distancing itself from its municipal partners. “The measures announced by the Vox councilors are part of a proposal prepared by that party, a proposal that they tried to urgently bring to the ordinary plenary session in May, although in the end it was not included in the agenda,” the popular ones argued, avoiding clarify the substance of the issue: your opinion on the ultra motion. The PP limited itself to clarifying that part of these proposals “are already being carried out, others are not under municipal jurisdiction and in some more [los dos partidos de gobierno] “They do not share the same criteria.”

The PSOE councilor Sonia Rodríguez, who is also a lawyer for the NGO Burgos Acoge, has reminded the extreme right-wing councilors that the City Councils have the obligation to register all their inhabitants and that the Local Police cannot be asked to prevent this. . Furthermore, she has highlighted, migrants in an irregular situation do not receive aid beyond subsistence resources administered by social workers and in no case can they obtain it while living outside Spain, as Vox denounced.

The Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, led by Elma Saiz, wanted today to “deeply condemn this interference in matters that are the responsibility of the National Police for xenophobic purposes”, since, in its opinion, it must “ensure compliance with the law without criminalizing any person for reasons of race or origin.” In a note sent by its spokesperson, the Inclusion department explains that it has contacted the Interior to coordinate “an action that protects human rights and specifically citizens.” The message reminds us that “it is impossible to identify if a person is in an irregular situation with the naked eye, and doing so randomly based on skin color is a clearly xenophobic action.” Likewise, the “interference in matters that are the responsibility of the national police for xenophobic purposes” is criticized, alluding to the fact that the National Police has the capacity to sanction, not the municipal police.