The Ministry of the Interior has raised this Tuesday to 2,168 the number of unaccompanied migrant minors registered in Ceuta since July 30. This means that the National Police has located, identified and placed 2,168 children at the disposal of the government of the city of Ceuta since the beginning of the migratory crisis until 9 a.m. this Tuesday.
This represents 270 more minors than those counted until last Thursday, when the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, counted the number of minors at 1,898.
The minors remain in Ceuta waiting for solutions to be articulated, either through repatriation or through their referral to other autonomous communities due to the saturation of the capacity of the autonomous city.
There is also a percentage of children and young people from countries like Chad or Sudan who are fleeing wars and humanitarian crises and have the right to international protection, as Save the Children has recalled, which has focused on women, girls or adolescents, who add to these problems those of forced marriages, sexual violence or trafficking.
Next week, the central Government has summoned the autonomous communities to a sectoral conference to discuss the relocation of children and adolescents arriving in stressed areas such as Ceuta for better care and the transfer, by the Executive, of 25 million euros to the autonomous city to care for minors.
The autonomous governments of the PP, however, oppose this debate because they are against the system, while the three coalition executives in which Children's policies are in the hands of Vox (Aragón, Extremadura and Castilla y León) do not even want to participate.
The other path, return to the countries of origin, is not simple, since it can only be done if it is demonstrated, through an individualized study, that this is really what is best for the minor, which is why in practice these returns are almost never carried out.
The Supreme Court ruled that the massive return of minors to Morocco that was carried out after the migratory crisis in 2021 was illegal, due to the “absolute non-observance” of the guarantees established by the immigration law, such as carrying out a case-by-case study of the individual circumstances of each young person.
Guarantees that must be respected even despite the existence of an agreement such as the one reached with Morocco in 2007 for the concerted return of minors, something that the Government had hidden behind.
Although this mechanism is provided for in the law through family reunification, its execution is complex because it requires ensuring at all times the best interests of the minor, for which an exhaustive study is necessary, case by case.
Among other issues, it is essential that the minor wants to return and, among other procedures, the Government Delegation has to obtain a report from the authorities of the country of origin on the socioeconomic situation of the family to verify that the young person will be well cared for in the event of their return.
Furthermore, within the procedure, the young person has the right to be heard, to have a lawyer and to appeal to a judge if they do not agree with the decision.
The law also contemplates as another option the provision of the minor to the protection services of the country of origin, but this would again require justifying that the young person would be better served in the reception network of the country of origin than in Spain.
