Asylum Seekers Overwhelm Madrid Airport as Migrants Exploit Layover Loophole

Nearly 600 sub-Saharan migrants are crammed into rooms at the airport. Police unions and employees at Adolfo Suárez-Madrid Barajas airport explain that these sub-Saharan migrants, mostly of Senegalese origin, board Royal Air Maroc flights in Casablanca bound for El Salvador, Bolivia or Brazil, with a stopover in Madrid. "The Senegalese, for example, do not need a visa to go to El Salvador or Nicaragua. They don’t need a transit visa either to pass through Spain," confides an Iberia employee at Adolfo Suárez-Madrid Barajas airport to El Espanol.

"What they do when they arrive here is tear up their passport and ask for asylum. They do what the mafias tell them to do," says a source from the Jupol police union. The Iberia employee adds that these migrants "are often stuck in Madrid because the tickets [to cross the Atlantic] are forged by the mafia." Finding themselves unable to continue their journey and unable to leave the airport, they have no choice but to apply for asylum. The Spanish authorities are aware of the problem. In mid-January, the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, went to Rabat to discuss with his Moroccan counterpart in order to find a lasting solution.

For the moment, one of the options considered is the implementation of a transit visa preventing stopovers in Madrid. But in the meantime, migrants continue to arrive in mass at Adolfo Suárez-Madrid Barajas airport where they live in deplorable conditions. A confrontation between two groups of migrants almost turned into a tragedy on Saturday, if it had not been for the rapid intervention of the police. Twelve riot police officers were deployed in the area to provide a permanent presence. The Jupol police union, for its part, denounces a lack of staff to handle all the asylum applications, the most numerous of which are related to sexual orientation, human trafficking and genital mutilation.

"The situation is untenable. People are deprived of basic hygiene conditions. There are not enough toilets, there is nowhere to sleep, the few beds that exist are in deplorable conditions, there are bed bugs, there is no control of possible diseases... It is a situation that violates all fundamental basic rights, not only of the constitution, but also of international law," criticizes a lawyer specialized in asylum applications, denouncing the slowness in processing applications due to the difficulty of finding an interpreter who understands darija or Wolof. An asylum seeker can easily spend "10 or 15 days" waiting to be interviewed, the lawyer notes.