Moroccan Families Urge Migrant Children to Stay in Ceuta Amid Bleak Prospects at Home

"My parents encourage me to stay here and not to return to Morocco where there is no future, there is no life," says Hassan (pseudonym), 13 years old. His mother, who called him once on the phone, was categorical and even asked the educators at the center to do everything to prevent him from returning to Morocco, reports El Pais.

Like Hassan, several minor migrants entered Ceuta en masse on May 17 and 18. Omar, 17, worked in Fnideq before following the movement to the border on May 17. "I finished work, I was paid and I came," he says. And he adds: "You can’t live without doctors, without work, without school or without education. We don’t hate Morocco, we hate the one who runs the country... You see us happy, laughing, playing... But at night, when we’re in bed, we cry and we want to be with our parents. We want to have a future, we want a life."

The situation of these minors is of concern to the local authorities who are trying to carry out family reunifications. But collaboration with Morocco does not facilitate things, acknowledges the juvenile judge of Ceuta, José Luis Puerta. The magistrate explains that the minors should be handed over to the Moroccan authorities and not to the families. Except that in practice, Moroccan parents have always traveled to Ceuta to pick up their children. But with the closure of borders for health reasons, this option is not possible and Morocco does not seem willing to reopen Tarajal to allow these reunions. Under these conditions, the children must be entrusted to the border guards who will have to take them to a meeting point with their parents in Morocco, after verifying the papers. The hitch in this process is that Spain does not have the ability to verify the effectiveness of the returns.

In total, a dozen family reunifications have been carried out after the migration crisis, only with Moroccan relatives residing in Spain and not in Morocco. More than a thousand Moroccan minors are still taken care of by the local authorities and others continue to wander the streets of the city.