SPANISH police have moved onto Ceuta’s Trampolin beach to clear a makeshift camp of around 4,000 migrants this morning.
Guardia Civil rapid-response units reached the beach shortly after 7am on Thursday, before Policia Nacional riot squads and Policia Local officers joined them to cordon off the shoreline and start moving people towards the two sites.
Two new facilities at Loma Margarita and the Embolsamiento car park on Loma Colmenar have been set up to receive them.
However, the official numbers given state they can only house 1,800 people – less than half the number camped on the beach they are meant to replace.
One of the two, Loma Margarita, is a hangar being pressed into use while a new permanent base is built nearby, while the Embolsamiento site on Loma Colmenar is a car park where tents have already gone up.
On the sand, the director of Ceuta’s state-run migrant reception centre, the CETI, moved through the crowd telling people to stay seated and calm, and that this was a humanitarian operation rather than the deportation many of them feared.
The clearance follows weeks of rising tension on the beach between Moroccan and sub-Saharan African groups sharing the site, including a mass brawl days ago that erupted after a mobile phone was stolen.
The camp built up over three weeks, after roughly 72,000 migrants crossed into the Spanish enclave from Morocco on July 30 and 31 the largest mass crossing Ceuta has seen.
The two sites being used today sit inside a wider push to add shelter space across the city, which began on August 17 when the minister for inclusion, social security and migration, Elma Saiz, announced 1,500 new places across four separate sites after meeting Ceuta’s president, Juan Jesús Vivas.
“Our work here aims to guarantee proper humanitarian care, protect people’s fundamental rights and preserve their dignity, while we help Ceuta get back to normality as soon as possible,” Saiz said.
Saiz visited the Loma Margarita hangar on Wednesday and signed off on housing around 400 people there specifically, on top of the wider capacity being built across the city.
Cruz Roja has been running the humanitarian response on the ground under a €6.5 million emergency declaration, handing out around 4,000 meal kits a day since August 3 and giving medical and welfare support to more than 4,000 people in the city.
Ceuta’s Government Delegation, the Spanish state’s own representative office in the city, has also told the local authority it must fence off Trampolin beach once it is cleared to stop a new camp forming there, and carry out a full clean-up of the site.
The clearance comes as the Guardia Civil’s own officers’ union, AUGC, has separately raised the alarm over trafficking gangs shipping migrants directly from Ceuta to the Spanish mainland by boat, charging between €2,000 and €8,000 a journey to dodge police checks on the border crossing.
Nine people, seven migrants and two suspected boat operators, were intercepted off La Sirena, on Ceuta’s coastline, on Monday in one such attempt, with two of them falling into the water during the operation.
Vivas has also given the government a 30-day deadline to begin deportation proceedings against those with no right to stay, warning he will otherwise take the matter to Spain’s Supreme Court and Constitutional Court, and accusing Madrid of trying to ‘paper over reality’ in the city.
Even with both sites full, as many as 2,200 people who were living on Trampolin beach this morning will still have nowhere confirmed to go.
Click here to read more Spain News from The Olive Press.
