The arrival of dozens of migrant minors in Ceuta in recent days has strained the city’s reception resources to the limit. With more than 400 children and adolescents confined in centres and an industrial warehouse because the 360% of places have been exceeded, the president of the autonomous city, Juan Jesús Vivas, asked the Government for help on Thursday. In a letter addressed to the autonomous communities and several ministries, the longest-serving of the PP’s regional presidents, he asked “immediately” for a solution to derive “in an agile and binding manner” these children and adolescents to the peninsula. According to sources from his department, the Minister of Youth and Childhood, Sira Rego, called Vivas on Friday and assured him, also by letter, that she is offering “support” to the communities “in order to speed up the transfers agreed from Ceuta”, which amount to 87.
The transfers referred to by the minister are those agreed at the last sectoral conference on Children held in Tenerife on July 10. At that meeting with the autonomous communities, the transfer of 347 minors was approved, of which 87 were to leave Ceuta and the rest of the Canary Islands, within the framework of the voluntary distribution mechanism that has been applied since 2022. It was a minimum agreement, since at that meeting the Government intended to take the pulse of the communities on their intention – with the support of Ceuta and the Canary Islands – to change the Immigration Law to make the distributions mandatory. The PP councilors already announced their rejection, which their party would formalize days later in Congress. The proposal did not go ahead due to the refusal of the PP, Junts and Vox, which prevented the proposal from even being admitted for processing.
The minister insists in her letter that the migration phenomenon cannot be managed with specific responses and reminds Vivas, who defended the mandatory distribution among his ranks, of the failure of this initiative. “As you well know, this plan […] “It was designed to start a structural process of migratory reception and had sufficient funding. However, it was rejected by several parliamentary groups in the Congress of Deputies, including the main opposition group, the Popular Party,” says the letter to which EL PAÍS has had access. “I convey to you the commitment of the Government of Spain and the Ministry of Youth and Childhood to implement agile, effective and lasting responses. I ask for your full support and that of your partners for this,” it concludes.
Ceuta has 406 minors accommodated as of Thursday, according to sources from the autonomous government. It is approaching one of its greatest milestones, recorded in 2019, when 470 young migrants were assisted. So far this year, the number of arrivals is six times higher than in 2023. Vivas’s Executive does not hide the fact that it is overwhelmed and recalls that the autonomous city welcomes five unaccompanied minors per 1,000 inhabitants, when the national average does not reach 0.001 per 1,000.
The children’s authorities have been opening new centres as the number of minors taken in grew until they ended up using an old warehouse in the Tarajal industrial estate. In this area, close to the border, spaces were already opened to house minors after the massive entry of 10,000 people in May 2021 in appalling conditions. The space is now enabled, but it is still a closed warehouse with no windows facing the outside.
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