The Red Cross has decided to once again provide psychosocial assistance to asylum seekers at Madrid-Barajas airport.
The organization made the decision almost a month after leaving due to the conditions in which those who requested protection were kept at the airfield.
For months, reception in the rooms set up for these people was chaos, with episodes of overcrowding, bedbug infestations, leaks, poor nutrition and hygiene.
Three judges asked for “urgent measures” from the Interior and National Police to resolve the situation and the Ombudsman warned of possible “degrading treatment” of the applicants.
“We have been denouncing this situation for a long time.
We are not leaving from one day to the next,” the director of the Red Cross Migration Area, José Javier Sánchez Espinosa, told EL PAÍS on January 24.
Today Espinosa explains that the situation has improved and that the conditions are now in place to return to work.
“The occupancy is much lower, the rooms have been disinfected, they have been tidied up... It's a different situation,” he maintains.
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The withdrawal of the Red Cross did not sit well with either the Ministry of Migration, which pays for the contract with the organization, or the Police.
In the end, at the worst moment of the crisis, the Red Cross withdrew, also leaving on hold the subcontracting with the cleaning company in charge of maintaining the rooms, which the police had to assume.
Espinosa is aware of this.
“That's why it was such a measured decision.
We could have left many places many times, but as long as there is the possibility of helping people we stay.
But if there comes a time when we see that even if we remain, our presence is not going to have an impact, it becomes clear that it is time to leave,” he says.
With the return of the Red Cross, the airport crisis is relatively resolved after months of complications.
There are still improvements pending, according to the Trafficking and Immigration Prosecutor, Beatriz Sánchez, who visited the airport rooms recently.
In an interview with EL PAÍS, the prosecutor assured that the conditions were “clearly improvable.”
Sánchez added: “The current conditions are only admissible if it is a critical and urgent moment.
But situations like this can happen again.
We believe that there must be adequately equipped facilities that can be, for example, modular, to be prepared for when it happens again."
The crisis at the airport began to brew in the summer with the arrival of hundreds of Somalis who managed to make a stopover in Madrid with passports purchased from Kenya.
They were joined by Moroccans and Senegalese, above all, exceeding the capacity that the police and the rooms usually have for processing asylum applications.
They were weeks of chaos, during which the Interior implemented some reinforcement measures to stop the flows.
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