The afternoon approaches and the fog begins to penetrate Ceuta. The beaches of Ceuta were still full of residents and tourists, when the cell phone of a person in charge of the juvenile area began to receive photos of an intense fog approaching the border dike. “Tomorrow it looks like we will receive more,” some of their colleagues tell them. The images and messages made him suspect that, the next day, the already saturated shelters, those limited spaces that the local government has been trying to expand as much as possible for weeks, would welcome new minors to be cared for with fewer and fewer resources. And so it was.
A few hours later, late in the morning, darkness and fog covered the entire horizon. One of the Civil Guard vehicles deployed in front of the beaches of the Mediterranean coast of the parks of the autonomous city on an esplanade located in a rocky cove with a wide perspective of the place where, it is said, there are already dozens of people in the sea. Many should be minors. The agent places a kind of high-tech binoculars in front of his eyes and directs his gaze he does not know where exactly.
“Are there any children swimming around here?” elDiario.es asks him. The guard raises his hands in ignorance and points to the water, the sky, the fog or all of them together, because at that moment the thick fog makes it impossible to differentiate one thing from the other. “It seems so, but how can we know like that… We try to keep our eyes open so that if there is anyone, we can get them out of there. I hope we can get these creatures out and none of them stay, as happens to us at other times,” he says shortly before putting the device back on his eyes. “With this, we are supposed to see something else, but with this fog, everything is very complicated.”
It is the same fog that pushes them to jump, given the lesser possibilities of police control due to the low visibility, but it is also what puts them in greater danger, having to swim without seeing anything and generally with bigger waves. From the coast, the fog barely lets us see the lights of the Civil Guard boat that slowly patrols the area in search of the swimmers who, from Morocco, have thrown themselves into the sea from the coast of Castillejos. Sometimes they appear, but they hide again under the fog. A few hours later, when the wind dissipates the fog for a few moments, the patrol boat begins to detect the first people swimming in the darkness in the water.
They come out soaked. Many of their faces express fear and deep exhaustion. They walk barefoot along the shore, slowly, heads down. They obey the orders of the agents who guard them and who will end up deciding their fate according to the instructions received: whether they stay or whether they are sent back to Morocco. Among them, on Sunday at dawn, 12 were minors and will remain in the autonomous city. The others, if they were adults, Moroccan and detected by the civil guards, would in principle be sent back to the place from which they left. During the rest of the day, the entries of children did not stop, even in broad daylight, to the point that the Civil Guard and the National Police decided to evacuate the border beach of Tarajal, after dozens of bathers arriving from Morocco tried to pass unnoticed among the children. families from Ceuta who were enjoying the beach at that time, to avoid being arrested by the Civil Guard, due to the risk of being sent back.
Three days earlier, in the early hours of Wednesday to Thursday, 47 children and adolescents had arrived in the autonomous city. Thus, in the previous days and weeks, dozens of children have been trying to cross the city’s border breakwaters, in an almost constant net, intensified especially during the month of August, when the autonomy received more than 230 minors out of a total of 630 so far this year.
Illias was in the middle of that darkness mixed with water and thick fog about a month ago. The boy, who says he is 15, is small, thin and seems even younger than he claims. On one of those foggy days, like those that Ceuta has experienced in recent nights, the minor waited for hours with a friend of the same age since five in the afternoon on a piece of cardboard in the mountains. They were waiting there for the right moment to try, the teenager says.
They waited until midnight, when they went down to the beach and another group of boys gathered with the same objective. “When we saw the agents busy, we ran out and got into the water. There were 15 of us and six of us arrived. They gave the rest back,” recalls the little boy on the sidewalk of one of the roads that leads to the reception center in Ceuta where he lives. “It was foggy. I swam for two hours. It was very difficult,” describes the minor, who says he went to the sea wearing a T-shirt and pants, without other types of preparations that those who migrate by swimming usually wear, such as a float, flippers or a neoprene suit.
Shortly after arriving at the warehouse set up in the city as the first reception point for migrant minors, Illias called his mother. His family did not know that he had jumped into the sea. He told her that he was in Spain. “She was very happy,” the little boy says with a shy smile and wide eyes.
“Six bathrooms for 120 people”
When Illias arrived in Ceuta, although the centres for minors were already over capacity, the peak of admissions of children and adolescents recorded in August had not yet been reached. This month alone, more than 230 minors have arrived out of a total of 600 registered so far this year. The little boy says that he perceives a change in some of the reception conditions, although he prefers to complain little: “There are many older children and there are problems with them, but you have to be patient,” the boy replies.
Adnan takes longer and begins to complain a little more. He reached Ceuta by swimming seven months ago. The deterioration of reception conditions during this period, he says, is evident. The center where he is staying, called Piniers 4, was created to accommodate 36 people. Today, there are more than 120. “Before, we lived very well, but now there are many more of us in the same space,” explains the 17-year-old boy from the Moroccan city of Beliones, near the border breakwater of Benzú, located on the Atlantic coast of Ceuta.
“There are about a hundred of us and there are six bathrooms. Six toilets and six showers. Imagine,” says the teenager, who says that now he has to queue to go to the toilet. “Even if we really want to, we have to wait,” he says, while his lifelong friend, with whom he swam for about 45 minutes to Ceuta, agrees.
From the minors area of the Autonomous City Government, they confirm Adnan’s impressions. “The saturation we are experiencing is putting all the services at risk, all the attention we can give to these children: health, education and we are aware of the risk of overcrowding… We cannot serve the 470 that we currently have,” they say. say from the department responsible for caring for the children in care. The center where Adnan lives was designed to accommodate 36 children. As arrivals increased, the Autonomous City created sleeping spaces in other modules that were not designed for this purpose, where bunk beds were introduced to accommodate as many children as possible. “We are trying to install new toilets or create a new dining room so that they do not have to wait so long to eat, but we are getting caught up in the bull. Due to the particularities of Ceuta, everything takes much longer,” they say from the department in charge of minors.
Ceuta’s juvenile prosecutor, José Luis Puerta, shares the same concern. “If a center is designed for 30 places and they have more than a hundred, it can’t work,” he criticizes. “Since mid-August, at least a dozen have been arriving every night. Because of the progression that this requires, they have to do something. Because Ceuta is not prepared to take it on and serve them as it should,” he adds.
Puerta highlights another problem related to the overcrowding of the centers: “Coexistence is not the same coexistence in a room between six people, as between eight or ten. Or among more than a hundred to share other facilities. And that produces bad vibes and a bad atmosphere,” says the prosecutor. Illias and Addan regret some fights that have occurred in the center and highlight with concern the age difference of the minors housed in the same space. “There are children of 14 and 15 years old with others of 17 years old and I think that can be bad for the little ones,” wonders Addan.
The situation is far from that experienced during the 2021 crisis, when more than a thousand minors entered the city by swimming due to the lack of Moroccan controls, but with the memory in mind of those days when children lived overcrowded in industrial centers. warehouses. -, the local Executive asks to stop tightening the rope and to accelerate transfers to the peninsula, as well as to increase the budget allocation to respond to the emergency. The call from Ceuta, whose president requested “help” from the central government and the rest of the autonomies just over a week ago, comes a month after his party (PP) canceled the reform of the immigration law with which the national government The Executive and the Canary Islands were considering creating a mandatory system for the distribution of migrant minors in the event of an emergency such as the one currently being experienced by the autonomous city.
The summer weather, combined with the fog that reduces the control capacity at the borders of Morocco and Spain, has led to a spike in swimming arrivals in Ceuta in recent months, especially of Moroccan minors. Although the flow of entries into the autonomous city by this route is generally constant, it has intensified in recent months, which has had an effect on the saturation of the reception centres in the autonomous city. According to the government of Ceuta, capacity is exceeded by 420%.
The staff dedicated to the care of minors in Ceuta have identified a change in the profile of children and adolescents who come to the city by swimming. If before there was a greater proportion of children from broken families, living on the streets or fleeing situations of abuse, and therefore presenting more behavioral problems due to the trauma suffered, these stories are now in the minority, several sources point out. Many of the boys and girls who have crossed the border in recent months come from normal family situations, have been to school and have a more defined immigration project.
Addan, for example, was studying his second year of high school in Morocco when he jumped into the sea to reach Spain. He was living with his parents, but his sister was currently the only one working at home: “I want to earn a living. In Morocco, there are no options,” reflects the 17-year-old, who already speaks Spanish well. Illias was also studying in his country, but says that “there was no future.” His plan is to travel to the peninsula, continue his studies and learn Spanish. “There was nothing there. I woke up in the morning and there was almost nothing to do. I want to be in a good place and play football,” says the little boy.
