MADRID, Spain – The National Police deployed early on Sunday morning to the esplanade next to the Guano factory to clear the last major illegal settlement remaining in Ceuta of migrants who arrived in the autonomous city during the mass entry of 30 and 31 July. More than twenty Police Intervention Unit vans began arriving from 7.30am at the esplanade, where fewer than a thousand Moroccans had been camping since the clearance of the shanty settlements on Trampolín and Benítez beaches.
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Within an hour the area had been almost entirely cleared, and cleaning crews began removing tents, improvised structures, abandoned belongings and large quantities of waste accumulated on the esplanade to restore sanitary conditions. The first buses left Guano carrying migrant minors, who were taken to the Higher Police Headquarters to be identified and accommodated in centres enabled by the autonomous city’s government, with the locating of numerous minors still in the camp being one of the most significant aspects of the operation given that transfers to protection centres had been carried out in recent weeks. Officers separated these youths from adults to organise their care and transfer through differentiated channels, and among them were some carrying signs requesting admission to reception centres.
Adult migrants, meanwhile, were taken to the CATE, the temporary reception centre for foreigners located in the Tarajal industrial estate, where they will be identified and registered before being taken to one of the camps enabled by the central government while asylum procedures are resolved, while those who do not wish to go through this process have the option of returning voluntarily to Morocco on buses that will leave them at the Tarajal border.
This new police operation was mounted just over 48 hours before the official visit that King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia will make to Ceuta on Tuesday, in a city still facing the consequences of the migration crisis that began more than two months ago, meaning the clearance of Guano does not imply the complete removal of all migrants from the streets nor anything close to the end of the crisis. The esplanade was the last settlement with a significant concentration of Moroccans, but hundreds of them still wander the streets of neighbourhoods such as El Príncipe or Los Rosales, while others hide in the hills or live in overcrowded flats that Spanish authorities are progressively dismantling. The operation involved officers from the Police Intervention Unit, the Prevention and Reaction Unit and Foreigners units, along with unmanned aerial vehicles to monitor movements around the settlement. Units from the General Command of Ceuta also took part, some equipped with riot gear, while the Civil Guard deployed two Maritime Service vessels to watch the coast, and the Local Police restricted traffic at access points to the area, allowing only residents and authorised personnel to pass.
Previous estimates put the number of migrants still on the Guano esplanade at around 500, trying to cope with the cold and rain that began lashing the city two weeks ago, though a progressive departure of occupants had been recorded in recent days ahead of the police intervention. Of those 500, around a hundred were minors, who days earlier had demonstrated there to demand relocation to reception centres. Around 1,700 people were taken from Benítez and Trampolín beaches, the vast majority of whom, except for minors and some small groups of adults, chose to return to their country. It was calculated that more than 3,500 were sleeping at Trampolín alone, meaning the rest scattered across the city to avoid boarding those buses, with many fleeing into the hills where they remain.
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The Moroccans who fled are aware that the enormous probability is that their asylum requests will be denied, and know that once they receive a definitive refusal they will face an expulsion order from Spain for five years, which is why many prefer to return voluntarily to Morocco because they retain the aspiration of returning in the future, while others remain hidden in the city without even considering the option of returning or being registered to later seek asylum. According to police sources, the latter harbour the hope of having a chance to cross irregularly to the peninsula, and since the beginning of August the Civil Guard has aborted several attempts at illegal crossing to the peninsula in recreational vessels, sometimes detaining those responsible for the illegal operation who promised to take migrants across in exchange for money, and in other cases the boats carried no skipper but had been acquired by the migrants themselves to try their luck.
