Since the beginning of the year, a
new modality of entry of immigrants to Spain
is generating concern, nerves and tensions in the national government, in the Community of Madrid and, above all, in the capital's airport, Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas.
Because it has already happened on more than a hundred occasions and continues to happen almost daily: passengers on flights that departed from an African country and with a final destination in South America
make a stopover in Madrid and stay here
.
Some, as soon as they set foot on Spanish soil, destroy their documents and request asylum.
Others present themselves as unaccompanied minors and thus enter the specific protocol that applies when it is necessary to welcome foreign girls or boys who arrive alone and are under 18 years of age.
The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, describes it as “fraudulent use of the scales.”
On Friday, during a visit to Rabat, where he met with the Moroccan Minister of the Interior, Abdelouafi Laftit, Grande-Marlaska announced that
Spain is studying establishing transit visas
to decongest the airport, overwhelmed by asylum seekers.
less risky
An Iberia ticket, for example, to fly in February from Casablanca, in Morocco, to São Paulo, in Brazil, is around 970 euros, round trip.
A figure that is cheaper and less dizzying than paying - to the networks that traffic people - to risk their lives and cross the Atlantic by rubber.
According to the Ministry of the Interior,
in the first half of 2024, 3,678 people entered Spain illegally
.
Almost all - 3,480 - arrived in 53 boats.
The majority landed in one of the Canary Islands, where irregular immigration increased by 286 percent compared to the first fifteen days of 2023.
Asylum application
In 2023, Spain received more than 163,000 requests from potential future refugees, 30 percent of whom submitted their application in Madrid.
“Last year an average of 77 new minors arrived per month, now we have gone to 400,” admits the Minister of Family, Youth and Social Affairs of the Community of Madrid, Ana Dávila.
A group of migrants run after crossing the fence that separates the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco, in an image from 2022. Photo: AP
Although not all people who use the Madrid stopover of their flights to stay in Europe want to stay in Spain.
On Sunday, January 14, 17 migrants broke a window in the room where they were waiting to process their asylum application at the airport and escaped.
Two days before, nine other people also
escaped from Barajas by breaking the ceiling of the room they were in.
The Spanish Commission for Refugee Assistance (CEAR) denounced that the conditions in which asylum seekers wait at the Barajas airport violate fundamental rights.
“The rooms intended for the reception of asylum seekers exceed their capacity, housing as of today (January 22) more than 390 people in undignified and inhuman conditions,” they point out.
Around 182 people have not yet been able to formalize their asylum request, mainly from Senegal, Morocco, Somalia, Venezuela and Colombia.”
CEAR reminds that, according to European standards, registering an asylum application is a procedure that should be carried out within a period of between 3 and 10 days.
“Delays in the formalization of applications reached up to 18 days in December, although the situation has improved slightly, reducing it to 8,” they say.
From the office in Spain of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), they tell
Clarín
:
“We are very concerned about the situation at the Barajas airport of overcrowded asylum seekers without adequate hygienic conditions for a long time.” .
An African migrant crosses the fence that separates Morocco from the city of Ceuta, Spain, in a file image.
Photo: REUTERS
“We have reiterated our concern to the authorities and we are supporting them in the search for solutions,” they added.
“We are providing interpreters to support instructors from the Ministry of the Interior and lawyers who provide legal assistance to asylum seekers at border posts in these interviews in Barajas.”
The Ombudsman, Angel Gabildondo, visited the Barajas asylum rooms.
Consulted by
Clarín
, Gabilondo's defense attorney clarifies that it is necessary to "find a solution for the location of these people while their asylum request is resolved."
“It is urgent that an adequate space be enabled in decent conditions,” they add.
Illegal returns
This week, the Supreme Court confirmed that the immediate return - that is, returning a migrant to the place where they came from - of dozens of minors that the Civil Guard carried out in 2021 was illegal.
In August of that year, a wave of more than 12,000 immigrants, the vast majority of them children who were not yet of legal age, jumped the fences of Ceuta, one of the two Spanish cities on African soil.
The Moroccan gendarmerie and the Spanish Civil Guard made several of them return to Morocco.
For the Supreme Court there was an “absolute disregard” of what the immigration law establishes.
According to this rule, the return provides, before expulsion from Spain, that a file is opened for each minor with detailed information, that there is a hearing with them and that the Prosecutor's Office intervenes.
In August 2021, none of these steps were completed.
The opposition and other political forces called this Tuesday for the resignation or dismissal of the Interior Minister.
C.B.