A huge National Police and Civil Guard unit has cordoned off, at 7:30 a.m. this Thursday, the Trampolín beach, in Ceuta, to evict the more than 3,000 sub-Saharans and North Africans who occupy it in its entirety, all of them from the jump from Morocco on July 30. However, hours later, about 500 North Africans who were in the surrounding hills came down to the beach and began to set up shop using their own tents.
Some of them, as they told EL MUNDO, had also been on the beach before the eviction, but have returned because they claim that the police had explained to them that the eviction "was voluntary and not mandatory."
The new partial occupation of the beach has occurred while the cleaning services and removal of shacks that had been used days ago by immigrants of sub-Saharan and North African origin who had settled on the sand were being carried out. On this occasion, the new immigrants who are partially occupying Trampolín beach are all of North African origin.
By early afternoon, the new migrants have begun to deploy portable tents and some have begun to build glimpses of shacks.
As reported by the autonomous Administration, the work, started mid-morning by the Ministry of the Environment, Urban Services and Housing, has been temporarily paralyzed after the return of dozens of people to the site, apparently to collect or search for personal belongings.
About thirty police vans arrived at the scene just at dawn, at 7:21 a.m., closing in a perimeter half a kilometer long to the migrants, who had been camped on the beach for about a week in an improvised shanty town built in record time with reeds, ropes and cardboard.
The Interior's intention is to transfer the Maghrebs and sub-Saharans to one of the four temporary stay centers that are being built in the city of Ceuta, to assess their asylum requests, and for the most part to begin the process for their return to Morocco.
The operation, however, was extremely risky. Those gathered have been in inhumane conditions for three weeks, receiving only one meal a day, relieving themselves at sea and living in absolute precariousness, which could logically make their collaboration difficult - apart from the fear of being deported again, which they themselves express to anyone who asks them.
EL MUNDO was able to see from inside the camp how ministerial officials were shouting for migrants to be calm at the beginning of the deployment, which is taking place when these lines are written.
Equipped with masks, the agents have deployed around the congregation. All of them men, since women do not sleep in the shanty town. The migrants, who were still stretching, began to walk in all directions, but two ministerial technicians, helped by a translator, ordered them to sit down and wait. The migrants have obeyed the order.
The decision to vacate the beach and take the migrants to the two new centers was taken, as EL MUNDO has learned, on Wednesday night, when the city's police chiefs and members of the Secretary of State for Security decided to dismantle the place, where the migrants had been living badly for almost a week, with groups of them staging an abortive hunger strike to request asylum and, others, establishing everything from a small souk for exchanging clothes to a kind of mosque/prayer space. improvised
The unhealthiness in the place is total. Every afternoon, the Red Cross distributed about 4,000 food rations after a long control ritual with which the Police seemed to almost want to sedate the sub-Saharans and Maghrebs. The town was also built next to an urbanization of chalets in Ceuta, La Colina, whose neighbors have been complaining for weeks about coexistence problems.
The absolutely unhealthy situation threatened to cause very serious humanitarian problems in Trampolín, where Red Cross teams and volunteer doctors have been working for days. Only a few precarious showers had been installed, and the more than 3,000 migrants used two urinals and the two showers on the beach. The situation was potentially very dangerous and the Government could not risk a major public health problem.
The ministerial officials have carried out the same liturgy with the migrants that is used to give them food, but this time to get them off the beach. First they have been asked to sit down, and then they are asked to get up, in groups of about thirty, to be herded towards a breakwater in groups, in a typical scene of refugee camps and the great exoduses of wars. The migrants, asking if they can be taken back to Morocco, have obeyed and the operation, for the moment, is taking place without incident.
The migrants will be taken to the Loma Margarita and El Embolsamiento centers, built in haste by the Government in the face of the extreme situation. "No Morocco, no Morocco!" the technicians shouted at the migrants to take them to the centers where their data will be reviewed and the expulsion processes will begin.
