The successive evictions and relocations of migrants from Trampolín beach, in Ceuta, are happening continuously without the place being definitively emptied of young Maghrebis who arrived in the jump on the past days July 30 and 31, now 23 days ago.
This Friday, as yesterday, the authorities burst onto the beach at dawn, at 7:30 a.m. Although the place was evacuated yesterday, thanks to an impeccable deployment of both Security forces and technicians from the Ministry of Inclusion, who took 1,800 people to the first resources ready for them, many migrants returned to sleep on the beach.
They no longer had the shacks they had built almost a week before, about a hundred, which covered the entire beach, but they set up some tents. About 500 migrants slept there, while the surrounding hills remain in any case infested with people waiting to obtain asylum and living in conditions of absolute unsanitariness.
In any case, as was hinted from the City Council, Trampolín beach would be evacuated and cleaned again this morning, to the relief of Ceuta residents, who from the nearby chalets have been watching the spectacle for weeks with a mixture of anger, weariness, and astonishment. The Police arrived, then, at dawn; woke people up and applied themselves to dispersing those present, many of whom told journalists that they had stayed in the place because they had been given that option: the previous day’s eviction was “voluntary,” as was made clear from the Ministry. But this time the idea was not to relocate them, but simply to remove them from the beach.
Thus, the tents were removed and those present, all young Maghrebis, dispersed… Only to return to the beach as soon as the agents left the place. About ten tents were set up again and the public space returned to its appearance as a protest hub and almost a TV set, where migrants ask for asylum, although most of them are aware that it will be almost impossible to obtain it, unless they claim persecution for very specific reasons.
The evictions from Trampolín are, in any case, a drop in the ocean of Ceuta’s humanitarian drama, with every corner of the city turned into substandard housing for migrants who are increasingly showing fatigue in their fourth week after the jump.
