The National Police woke up this Sunday, around 7:00 a.m., the hundreds of immigrants who have been camping for two weeks at the doors of the Loma Colmenar reception center, one of the peripheral neighborhoods of Ceuta, waiting for a bed. They thought that the doors of the new facility, which houses about 1,200 people, would open overnight to make way for them. However, the agents had orders to transfer them to another center, where the authorization tasks were completed this morning.
According to police sources, there have been moments of confusion because the migrants, most of them Moroccans, thought they were going to be taken to the border to be returned to Morocco. But finally they understood that, voluntarily, anyone who wanted could be taken to the new tents, in the Los Rosales neighborhood.
The police operation has been carried out without any incident. The new resource has a capacity of 864 places, so the riot police deployed had the task of taking the number of people closest to that figure there, so that no one of those transferred was left out, and moments of tension could be relived with migrants trying to enter by force. Through a route of just over a kilometer, the Police have escorted them until their arrival at the facility, built on land provided by the Ministry of Housing. These new stores are located next to a municipal daycare center that was scheduled to open this academic year. Once there, shouts of “Long live Spain” were heard, sung by the immigrants who also chanted that they do not wish to return to Morocco.
The entire operation has been ordered, with the surveillance of the team of the Minister of Migration, Elma Saiz, who has remained in Ceuta since last Thursday with her Government colleague Ángel Víctor Torres, designated as sole command for the crisis. In groups of twenty they have been accessing the center after being registered. Piles of blankets, cardboard, and bags of food have piled up in the surrounding areas that the migrants have had to abandon. Among the hundreds of people were minors, who have also passed and then been referred to the corresponding resources. In this facility there will only be adult Maghreb migrants. They will be pre-registered, and then transferred to the Temporary Care Center for Foreigners (CATE), which has been set up by the Ministry of the Interior. There they will be triaged prior to the decision of the administrative route they will have in view of their expulsion.
Finally, 839 people have accessed it, according to police sources present at the device. In the next few hours, tickets will be filled until all 864 places are filled. With these, the Government now has 4,300 qualified places, which in the near future will reach 6,000. Work is underway to welcome, “as soon as possible,” more than 300 women to a new space located on the esplanade of the Sidi Embarek mosque. However, there are still many people on the streets. The president of Ceuta Juan Vivas, who has been more correct from the beginning with respect to the estimates, put the number of people still in the city at 14,000 on Friday after the massive crossing, through which between 70,000 and 80,000 foreigners entered.
