The minors who arrived in Ceuta amid the avalanche are not irregular no matter how much Santiago Abascal considers them “invaders” and Vox’s government agreements with the PP dehumanize them. The assault on the border raises doubts about the Spanish intelligence services, the more or less loyal collaboration of Morocco, and the allocations of forces and security bodies in the city, but it cannot generate any hesitation about the protection of minors.
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After the worst crisis at the southern border, Ceuta is attending to 1,342 migrant minors when it only has 30 places. That is 2,600% above its capacity. That does not include the children left on the street unidentified and whom Ceutans like Ramza Moreno help to include in a domestic census of NGOs. No one knows how many there are, and the return to Morocco is “practically impossible,” admits the president of Ceuta, Juan Jesús Vivas, in the midst of trauma.
The autonomous city – like the Canary Islands and Melilla – has been in a state of “extraordinary migratory contingency” since last year. That is, it has exceeded its resources three times over to receive and protect minors. The reform of the Immigration Law contemplates binding and solidarity reception in all communities in crises like Ceuta’s, and now it is time to comply. If not, there is the Prosecutor’s Office.
If a Supreme Court ruling has been pointed out as the seed that unleashed the avalanche at the border, it is the same court that set jurisprudence on the obligation of the autonomous communities to take charge of minors, to tutor them and protect their rights, including educational and health rights. If with the Canary crisis the Supreme Court stopped the Community of Madrid and determined that keeping minors “overcrowded” on the islands would cause them “serious harm,” it is hard to imagine the magistrates contradicting themselves given the magnitude of what happened in Ceuta.
Without stridency or fuss, the president of Ceuta addresses his own. Those PP barons who until now have battled in the courts over the distribution of minors. The popular communities and their socialist appendage, Castilla-La Mancha, appealed to the Constitutional Court against the obligation of solidarity reception. Then they launched into a judicial door-to-door: Constitutional, Supreme, and the two administrative courts of Ceuta. The transfer to the Peninsula has been discussed child by child, with dubious successes, for example, for Aragón. A claim was attended to because the transfer of a child to Zaragoza and not to another city was not justified. There have also been no-shows by councilors at sectoral conferences.
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The law will be enforced and there will be judicial struggle, but Vox will not break governments with the PP again
Now Vivas invokes the “humanitarian emergency” to bind the PP to the law while Vox calls to “hunt down one by one” the immigrants who entered Ceuta. The four coalition agreements of the PP with the far right in Andalusia, Aragón, Extremadura, and Castilla-León include a section titled “No more unaccompanied foreign minors” and explicitly include the commitment to oppose “by all legal, judicial, and political means any mechanism for the distribution of illegal immigrants.” Noise and more noise because the mechanism has been active until the end of July, more than 1,750 minors have been relocated.
Now the dilemma of the PP barons is whether to leave a colleague in the lurch while Vox maintains the narrative of the “invasion.” “Not one euro of Spaniards’ money for unaccompanied minors, for illegals, for invaders…” cries the far right. The law will be enforced and the judicial battle will return, but Vox will not break governments again. The speeches are enough for their electorate.
Talking about a “security” crisis does not exempt from the obligations of a “migratory crisis,” nor does showing as grievance the exclusion of Catalonia from previous relocation plans. Junts validated the decree that made distribution among communities mandatory in exchange for promoting the bill for the transfer of immigration powers to the Generalitat. Catalonia was not left out of the distribution; simply, the prior reception effort was taken into account, and the transfer of powers… was left in a drawer.
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