The Moroccan minors who crossed en masse to Ceuta without family support have banded together in the Tarajal warehouses, where a large part of the thousand unaccompanied migrant children and adolescents who remain – still unregistered – in the autonomous city are gathered. The nearly fifty days they have spent on the streets of the industrial estate, which has become a large temporary stay center for immigrants (CETI), have felt very long. Tarek, 16 years old, says that the fights, with recorded stabbings, keep him awake at night. For Fitah, the same age, what takes away his hunger is the smell of rot on every corner. For Yasim, a year away from adulthood, what worries him most is the appearance of his infected wounds on his feet. For Sulaimon, born in 2009, he is concerned about encountering again the soldier who, according to him, hit him on the side.
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They all agree that the situation is “hellish,” but most feel strong enough to endure more. They know that the returns of minors to the Alaouite kingdom are a utopia. And this is not only said by the videos flooding their social networks with the background song Goodbye Morocco, hello Málaga, but also by experience: Rabat has been ignoring the repatriation files of its minors, which are essential for family reunification, for years. According to ministerial sources, children who showed in May 2021, after the previous migration crisis, their willingness to return to their relatives could not return because Morocco did not even respond to the requests.
In the summer of 2021, the Ministry of the Interior led an operation to return 45 minors to Morocco. The head of the department, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, defended the action as “legal” because it was not “an expulsion, but an assisted return.” The Supreme Court did not consider it the same: it was illegal. The legal framework prohibits collective returns and requires individualized procedures that include the individual hearing of each minor.
When it is their turn, Tarek, Fitah, Yasim, or Sulaimon, if heard, will explain that they do not want to return to their country, where “there is no future.” Their families are aware that they joined the avalanche on July 30, and they think like them: their future does not involve returning to Tetouan, Casablanca, Fez, or Chefchaouen, where the four boys are from.
Living in warehouses
The adolescents in the Tarajal warehouses have not been registered to access care
Ceuta had 1,899 unaccompanied minors in care yesterday. The number fluctuates day by day, so local authorities round it to 2,000. This is not because transfers to the Peninsula or returns to Morocco are taking place, but because the number results from the daily counts made by the care centers. They are not deprived of liberty there, so some do not appear on some nights. The single command for the crisis estimates that between 700 and 1,000 remain unregistered.
The guardianship responsibility for them corresponds exclusively to the autonomous city. The central government cannot make decisions without the city’s approval. At this point in the equation, if Rabat demands that Spain return its Moroccan minors, who are in Ceuta’s hands, and Ceuta advocates for expelling “all of them,” why does President Juan Jesús Vivas not sign for them to be taken to the border today? Because the wrongdoing for the illegal expulsions of 2021 still echoes.
Again, Tarek, Fitah, Yasim, or Sulaimon know that sooner or later, they will be relocated to the Peninsula, when Ceuta, one of the regions that fought hardest for the mandatory distribution of minors, unblocks the situation. Meanwhile, they are content to leave the Tarajal warehouses.
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