Madrid airport is overcrowded with hundreds of asylum seekers; most from Africa

Madrid airport is currently just around the corner to an unprecedented influx of African asylum seekers, which has led to the government introducing new emergency visas and even the Red Cross throwing in the towel in protest. Hundreds of migrants, most of them from Senegal, have stopped in Madrid-Barajas in recent weeks, where they wait in overcrowded rooms and dormitories to apply for international protection or be deported.

“Overcrowding and unhealthiness have reached critical points, leading to bed bug infestations and accumulations of garbage,” with people forced to sleep on “inflatable mattresses on the floor” and “sometimes sharing a bed,” denounced the Spanish Commission for Aid to Refugees (CEAR ) at. NGO present on site.

Videos released to the press by police show cockroaches on the floor and unsanitary showers. According to official information, 864 asylum applications were registered at this airport in January alone, more than in the entire year of 2022 (767). According to CEAR and the police union SUP, the number of immigrants waiting in Barajas was between 390 and 450 at the end of January, compared to 250 at the end of December, according to the courts.

The authorities are overwhelmed Recently they failed to prevent the escape of 17 people by breaking a window. explained a police source. Six people also tried unsuccessfully to escape through a false ceiling. Very strange event: The Red Cross decided to withdraw from the airport last week because it could not carry out its work “normally,” its spokesman José Javier Sánchez told public television TVE.

These irregular migrants – who also come from Morocco, Somalia, Mali, Kenya and Mauritania – make a stopover in Madrid and do not take their connecting flight to Latin American countries that do not require a visa, a spokesman for the SUP union told AFP.

The migration crisis has overwhelmed Barajas Airport in Madrid.  (AFP)

“When they arrive here in Madrid, they never take the connecting flight and apply for asylum,” the spokesman explained, saying they came from a country in conflict.

When they arrived in Madrid, they “tore up the documents” and declared themselves minors, he added.. Although the number of asylum seekers at the airport has been increasing since last summer, the increase has been exponential since the end of 2023, and in late December three judges sounded the alarm by denouncing the lack of “health, hygiene and privacy”. and the “shortage of food” in the rooms intended for these immigrants.

The ombudsman visited the site on January 19 and called on the government to take measures to “ensure the rights of the people concentrated there.” The UN High Commissioner for Refugees on Friday lamented the “lack of humane conditions” on site and called for “urgent solutions” from the Spanish authorities.

Under pressure, the Spanish Interior Ministry opened on Tuesday a new waiting room that increases reception capacity by 47%, and claimed to have carried out the necessary “disinfection” to counteract the spread of insects. To curb the influx, the government also introduced a new transit visa for Senegalese arriving at the country’s airports from February 19 and for Kenyans from January 20.

Spain is one of the most important entry points for illegal immigration in Europe. Last year, 56,852 people entered the country illegally, almost twice as many (+82.1%) as in 2022, driven by record arrivals in the Canary Islands, even faster in January than a year ago.

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