The Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Óscar Puente, replied this Thursday to Alberto Núñez Feijóo that returning migrants as the president of the Popular Party proposed yesterday "is a crime" while the Secretary of State for Youth and Children, Rubén Pérez Correa, has called it "manifest illegality."
Yesterday, Feijóo, together with the president of Ceuta, the also popular Juan Vivas, demanded that the Government return all the migrants who entered the autonomous city on July 30 and 31, including minors. The leader of the PP refused to differentiate between adults and minors and defended that everyone should return to their countries of origin.
Puente, in one of his usual messages on
For his part, in an interview on Cadena Ser, Pérez Correa admitted to being “surprised” by the popular statements because Feijóo “knows perfectly how protection systems work.”
Thus, he has acknowledged that the ministry respects that Ceuta's priority is "the return of minors to Morocco", but "does not share" the mass deportation that Vivas and Feijóo defended at the press conference, recalling that this issue is illegal.
The Secretary of State has insisted that both the European return regulations, which require the search for a family, guardian or suitable facility for minors, and the Supreme Court itself, which in 2021 established that returns had to have an “individualized guarantee”, prevent the returns proposed by the PP leaders.
"If this were as easy as the PP proposes right now, their protection systems in autonomous communities that protect thousands of minors could have started this or have looked for this formula. They are aware that it is not legal," added the Secretary of State.
This Wednesday, President Vivas also denied being informed about the plan to transfer some 500 girls to the Peninsula that the Government is working on. However, Pérez Correa denies that the regional Executive was unaware of this plan. “You know it because we are working on it with your Childhood department,” he explained.
In this sense, the Secretary of State has stressed that the Ministry is in charge of making “a proposal based on the territory”, but that they are also “exploring the possibility” of referring the girls to specialized resources on the peninsula.
"We have the mechanism and the economic resources, we have allocated 25 million euros, it was the first emergency action because we already saw the serious migration contingency in the previous days," he detailed.
The Secretary of State has also admitted that they do not know the exact number of migrant minors who remain in the autonomous city since their illegal entry three weeks ago. "We have data on the minors who spend the night in Ceuta's protection systems that have been enabled by the residents themselves and that range takes us to 2,400 or 2,500 minors, but there will be more who are on public roads. It would have to be quantified clearly, but the city has territorial complexity and it is being difficult to identify the overall number," he said.
Regarding the possibility that the Autonomous Communities must welcome minors arriving in Ceuta, Pérez Correa has assured that "in all the autonomous communities the law will be complied with and if not, the Juvenile Prosecutor's Office will act." "We do not understand any other scenario. No general director or counselor can limit that a minor cannot be fostered. The right to foster care must be preserved," he warned, regarding the rejection of some PP communities, particularly those governed with Vox.
"We have an element of dialogue that is the sectoral conference, we have called it at the end of the month. I suggested that we include a point of the day on the Ministry's line of work and the situation in Ceuta, but the PP said that they did not want an information point," he denounced. “We believe that it is probable, that there is collaboration and we can understand the logic due to the presence of parties that act based on their interests, but we have worked well with PP administrations, such as in Ceuta,” he stated.
