The Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, appears this Thursday in an extraordinary session before the Joint Commission (Congress-Senate) of National Security of the Congress in order to explain his role as the person in charge of the "single command" in the management of the migratory crisis in Ceuta, a figure created to reinforce coordination among all the authorities and administrations involved.
The decision of the Executive was adopted this Tuesday, after the extraordinary meeting of the National Security Council chaired by Pedro Sánchez, held after the entry at the end of July of more than 80,000 migrants from Morocco into the autonomous city.
This new functional authority is supported by a collegiate body in which the Government of Ceuta participates, represented by its president, Juan Jesús Vivas; the Government Delegation; the National Intelligence Center (CNI); the Department of National Security and eleven ministries with competencies in crisis management. The Executive maintains that the situation has entered a "new phase" that makes it necessary to intensify institutional coordination.
In this stage, the Government has marked as a priority the "return and repatriation" of the migrants who remain in Spain, both adults and minors, ensuring respect for the legal framework and human rights. Torres indicated this Tuesday that between 90% and 95% of the more than 70,000 people who accessed Ceuta returned to Morocco in the first 24 or 48 hours.
Resources, facilities, and new reception model
The minister will also detail in Congress the resources and facilities planned to address the crisis, included in the royal decree of Declaration of Resources to be used in the situation of interest for national security in the city of Ceuta, in application of Law 36/2015 on National Security.
After the first meeting held this Tuesday in Ceuta between Torres and Vivas, both agreed that the spaces that will be enabled to host migrants will be decided "from consensus" and that the list included in the royal decree is a "modifiable and flexible maximum proposal."
Furthermore, Torres chaired this Wednesday the first meeting of the Situation Committee in charge of managing the crisis, with the presence of Vivas, representatives from the ministries that make up the collegiate body, and the Government Delegation. The minister emphasized that the goal of this new phase is to recover as soon as possible the "normality" prior in Ceuta to the massive entry of migrants and called for collaboration among all administrations.
During his appearance, the minister announced that the Executive will remove the sports centers in Ceuta as reception centers and will replace these venues with other locations. "We have visited other spaces and, therefore, the sports centers will be removed from that royal decree in its next update and other spaces will be included," Torres stated at a press conference.
Bolaños, the reinforcements in Ceuta and the dismissal of the official
In the same mixed commission, but before Torres's intervention, the Minister of the Presidency and Justice, Félix Bolaños, will appear to detail the personnel reinforcements sent to Ceuta to process the files related to the crisis. These reinforcements focus mainly on prosecutors, public defenders, and forensic experts assigned to identify the bodies of deceased migrants.
At the same time, the PP has requested the appearance of the director of the Cabinet of the Presidency of the Government, Diego Rubio, to explain the dismissal of the official from the Department of National Security who disseminated the first data on the illegal entry of migrants during the crisis in Ceuta last Thursday.
In the first 24 hours after the massive entry of migrants, the Government avoided providing official figures on how many people had entered irregularly into national territory, but the National Security website got ahead and on Friday morning published an initial figure of 49,000 people arriving in Ceuta in a single day.
That message from the DSN website, directed by General Loreto Gutiérrez Hurtado and integrated into the Cabinet of the Presidency of the Government, was the first figure disseminated by the Executive and placed the magnitude of the crisis at an unprecedented level, far exceeding that of May 2021, when about 10,000 people entered Ceuta in about 48 hours.
The publication was subsequently withdrawn and, around 2 PM that Friday, the Government made public its first official balance, in which it spoke of 50,000 people, a figure very close to that advanced by the National Security website.
The Executive admitted that the official responsible for the Department of Homeland Security's page had been dismissed for loss of trust, arguing that she disseminated "unverified" information about a particularly sensitive issue.
It is expected that the PP will take advantage of Bolaños' presence in the commission to revisit this matter, as they suspect that the official was "dismissed for doing her job well" and maintain that the Government "is afraid" of "the truth".