Pilar Alba, volunteer in Ceuta: The left is echoing the speeches of the extreme right

Pilar Alba, a volunteer with the Elín association in Ceuta, has stated that the left is echoing far-right rhetoric during the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the city. Thousands of migrants, including children, remain trapped in Ceuta nearly three weeks after crossing the border. Local organizations and NGOs working on the ground have condemned inhumane conditions and criticized the lack of institutional response, highlighting their reliance on local volunteers to sustain the lives of these migrant individuals. According to Catalina Perazzo, director of Influence and Territorial Development for Save The Children, locals are conducting a census of children, which reached 4,000 ten days ago. More conservative estimates suggest over 3,000. This lack of protection is particularly concerning for girls, who face extreme vulnerability due to reports of sexual violence in Ceuta. Perazzo noted that many of these girls do not have shelter, often staying in makeshift or informal camps and lacking basic hygiene conditions. Organizations such as EXMENAS, No Name Kitchen, and Elín have denounced the institutional abandonment through their social media platforms. They also criticize the political exploitation of this humanitarian crisis, both by the right and the left. Pilar Alba Díaz, a volunteer with the Elín association, explained to infoLibre the situation faced by migrant minors in Ceuta. What conditions are these migrant children living under? There are several spaces. On one hand, there are warehouses where families and children live on mattresses, with food distribution largely organized by neighborhood associations and collectives in Ceuta. Many others are on the streets because they cannot fit into these warehouses, without even being able to file individually to address their situations. Many children are in the woods and around the beaches, where access is more difficult. Most are aged 16 and 17 and are scared because they know younger children are being registered and can access resources, but they cannot. We have been trying to conduct a registration. In the case of girls, we track some who show particular vulnerability, including several who mentioned having been raped or abused. The association condemns institutional neglect. Yes, completely. We don't receive subsidies or assistance. Our work here, which has remained the same for 26 years, always consisted of denouncing violations of human rights. Often, this denunciation also involves informing authorities about what isn't being done or what's being done wrong. When we contact people still in street situations, we try to organize them by country, prepare a document, and go with representatives of these countries to a meeting with the Government Delegation so they can be present. In this instance, the citizen and social response is very complex. Now, migrants find it very complicated to walk through the center of the city, as many of them are attacked, and we are too. In many cases, when we accompanied someone to the hospital or helped someone or simply spoke with someone, citizens here confront us, insult us, and ask why we are doing this. Journalists and politicians from the far right have posted videos confronting migrants in Ceuta. Do you relate this to the violence you describe? We understand and see the tension existing among the population, which is nothing other than this sense of helplessness, unease, and concern regarding institutional abandonment. If spaces had been made available and more areas had been opened from the beginning, the situation would not have reached this point, and likely the confrontation would not have occurred. A stormy summer day perfectly suited. From the threat at the border to the humanitarian drama, the crisis in Ceuta comprises multiple overlapping crises that have become waterways for the national and international politics of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government. The entry of 80,000 people through the El Tarajal border on July 30 marked, according to the president himself, “a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity.” But that was just the beginning. Because from that emergency, largely addressed within hours with the return of most migrants, other fronts emerged, all still open three weeks later, ranging from the confrontation with European partners, doubts about Morocco’s neighborliness, the offensive by the United States and Israel, or the management of the massive flow of migration. The most urgent of these fronts is undoubtedly the humanitarian one. After two weeks with little response from public administrations, the central government finally seeks temporary accommodation solutions for the thousands of people remaining in Ceuta since late July, who have found themselves forced to camp on beaches, hills, cliffs, or in the streets. Without access to drinking water, food, personal sanitation, or a place to sleep. A situation that tensions the Ceuta society a bit more each day. Eighteen days after the start of the crisis, Minister Elma Saiz announced this week the installation of new sites with up to 1,800 beds under tents to address a demand, in reality, much higher. That lack of capacity, driven by the central government according to the low collaboration of the autonomous city government, imposes an unsustainable scenario in a territory of barely 20 square kilometers that has radically altered its daily life. And the complexity of that management, admit the government itself, “is terrible.” “We have thousands of people in the streets of Ceuta whom we are trying to find a solution based on the interest of the Ceutians, of course, but also respecting the law. The proposal of the PP and Vox that these people simply disappear is very irresponsible. They are lying to the people and that could have consequences. The migrants will not disappear from Ceuta because they have rights, we have obligations, and the process is, in addition, very long,” reason members of the executive, who admit without reservations that a decision on how to manage a migratory flow that has overwhelmed the autonomous city has not yet been taken. For now, public administrations have divided the migrant people remaining on Ceutan soil into two large groups. On one side, minors, mostly Moroccan in origin. The intention of the government, which aligns with the demands of the local executive and the PP, is their return to Morocco. But it clashes with the reality drawn by the registration of thousands of children and girls who refuse to return home. “It is very easy to launch slogans and political proclamations, but the reality is different. There are no children or girls registered who have asked to return home, nor are there Moroccan families claiming them. And Morocco does not take responsibility for the children who do not return with their parents. I would ask Feijóo what he would do with these children and girls. What is supposed to be done? Well, what we are doing: fulfilling our legal obligation to ensure the welfare of these children and providing them with care until a solution is found,” says a member of the government participating in the inter-ministerial meetings on this crisis. Blocked de facto the return to their country (among other things, due to the lack of active cooperation from the Moroccan government), the objective is that some of these children and girls can indeed be reunited with close relatives outside Morocco, given that many of them have relatives in other regions. The central government has not lived up to expectations in Ceuta. The installation of initial tents to accommodate migrants, 21 days after their arrival, proves something evident: photos of ministers meeting with the president or a parade of visits to Ceuta to make statements that clarified little or nothing. For many days, their only purpose, when conveying messages publicly, was to deny the evidence, of a city overwhelmed. To begin with, it is still unclear why so many thousands of migrants arrived, and in the absence of convincing explanations, we have deduced that the priority of the executive was initially to avoid a greater conflict with Morocco to thus guarantee its cooperation. Since the change in strategy, for lack of a better term, with the Sahara, that has always been the purpose of the government and neither with the suspicious espionage using the Pegasus software on the president and some ministers did it change its mind. Today, there is still no official calculation of the number of migrants wandering through Ceuta. The city government speaks of 10,000, a figure the central government places at half. Whether 10,000 or 5,000, if this is not a humanitarian crisis, I would like to know what is. It has been since they arrived and therefore the first day should have acted. But it wasn’t done and we don’t know why. Now it seems that the executive has begun to react genuinely, probably because it is aware that the normality it promised has not arrived and, in addition, it is going to last a long time. Minister of Inclusion, Social Security, and Migration, Elma Saiz, has installed herself in the city these days to be present during the operation to attempt to clear the Trampoline Beach and move the people who were living there to the temporary tents that have been set up. Bed and hygiene, it is the minimum after so many days. One should congratulate oneself on the plan to move 500 girls to the peninsula. They are the most vulnerable among the vulnerable. Volunteers had to stand guard at night to protect them, and residents of the Prince neighborhood improvised a shelter to protect them. Doctors, also volunteers, attended to them. This has happened these days in the Spain of 2026, the Europe of 2026. And what would Alberto Núñez Feijóo have done if he had had to manage this crisis? If what we have heard is true, he would have violated the law, something that is irresponsible and criminal. Because his proposal is mass deportation, without taking into account either the personal situation of each migrant, for example, whether they have the right to asylum, nor their age. He likes it more