The Red Cross has given up being at the Madrid-Barajas airport to serve asylum seekers. The organization is leaving after several weeks in which the accommodation of hundreds of people who requested asylum at the airfield has turned into chaos. The unusual volume of requests for international protection that are being registered at the airport has not only highlighted the lack of resources to attend to them, but also the inability to offer decent accommodation conditions. Since October, scenes of overcrowding, dirt, people sleeping on the floor and bedbugs have been repeated. “The conditions in the rooms do not allow us to do our work. We provide psychosocial assistance, we identify vulnerable profiles, and the number of people there does not even allow you to know how many there are, much less their needs,” explains the director of the Red Cross Migration Area, José Javier Sánchez Espinosa. “We have been denouncing this situation for a long time. “We are not leaving from one day to the next,” he adds. The organization’s withdrawal will be “temporary,” according to Espinosa. Until the situation is resolved.
According to sources present at the airport, this Monday there were 400 people in three rooms, with a total capacity of about 120 people, waiting for a response to their request.
The Red Cross, in addition to dedicating first attention to those who arrive, had subcontracted the cleaning service. “There came a time when there was no physical space to clean,” Sánchez maintains. Hygiene has been one of the main problems in Barajas, among other things because employees refused to work in the T4 room when it was known that there were bedbugs, at the beginning of December.
The work of the Red Cross at the airport is subsidized by the Ministry of Migration. “It is a temporary withdrawal until it is resolved,” maintains Espinosa. For the Red Cross, the solution to this problem is to allow these people to enter the territory while their request is being studied or to enable other spaces, but “rooms cannot be maintained for a limited number of people for the current volume.” , adds Sánchez.
The Ministry of the Interior does not support the organization’s decision. “The Ministry of the Interior respects the decision made by the Red Cross in the responsibilities assigned to it, but we do not share it. From the first moment we have defended institutional collaboration as the best way to resolve incidents, which are faced with more guarantees from all levels and with the effort and cooperation of all the actors involved,” the ministry explained to the media in a statement.
The department of Grande-Marlaska maintains that it has reinforced the number of National Police personnel and officials of the Asylum and Refuge Office, although it has not specified the number. “Given the specific increase in requests, the cleaning of the facilities has been reinforced and, in recent weeks, two new offices have been enabled for conducting interviews, which are added to the three already existing, and a third has been opened room to serve applicants,” the note adds. The ministry is looking for new formulas to speed up the procedures.
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On December 22, three judges required the Ministry of the Interior and the National Police to adopt “urgently” measures to put an end to the “overcrowding” that 250 asylum seekers were then suffering, including 19 minors, who were held in different rooms. from Barajas airport. Until very recently, this means of requesting protection in Spain, which consists of taking advantage of a stopover in Madrid to request asylum, was used marginally. However, in a few months it has increased significantly. From December 1 to January 15, 847 applications for international protection were processed at the Madrid airport.
To alleviate congestion, the Ministry of the Interior asked a judge for authorization to transfer fifty asylum seekers to the Foreigners Internment Center (CIE), the place where immigrants are locked up before being returned to their homes. countries of origin. The judge accepted the transfer on Tuesday, but the Prosecutor’s Office requested the annulment of the court order two days later, understanding that the condition of asylum seekers cannot be equated to that of foreigners in an irregular situation. The judge ended up revoking the decision and declared himself without powers to decide on the facilities in which asylum seekers must wait until their application is resolved.
Among the asylum seekers there are refugees from decomposing countries, such as Somalia, but in recent weeks the gap has opened and dozens of Moroccans and Senegalese have arrived, whose situations do not necessarily meet the conditions to receive protection. In the case of these nationalities, the police report that they had destroyed their documentation, which, on the one hand, allows them to simulate another nationality with more possibilities of receiving protection and, on the other, makes their expulsion difficult once their request is rejected. Since they do not have a passport, the nationalities of those arriving are difficult to confirm. The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, has spoken of a “fraudulent use of airport stopovers”, while police sources consider that a “tortious use of the asylum” is being made.
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