Junts is back and wants Catalonia to be able to immediately and autonomously control migration policies to prevent the arrival of migrants from Ceuta to Catalonia.
After demanding that Pedro Sánchez exclude the region from the distribution of minors arriving from Morocco during the illegal entry of foreigners that occurred on July 30, the party led by Carles Puigdemont has again submitted today in Congress the bill agreed with Pedro Sánchez to delegate immigration powers to Catalonia, which is one of the party’s major demands to rebuild parliamentary bridges with the coalition government.
This initiative was rejected in September 2025, with the opposing votes of PP, Vox, Podemos and two deputies from Sumar, but the neoconvergents hope to see it approved on this second attempt. To do so, they have taken a crucial step: they have removed from the preamble the expressions that made the morados uncomfortable and led them to vote against the text after considering it “racist”.
For example, the part defending the delegation of powers to “avoid possible effects that may pose a risk to coexistence and social cohesion” has been removed.
Despite accepting what was one of Podemos’ main demands to avoid blocking the text, the path of this new Junts bill is complicated, because now Ione Belarra considers this is not enough to accept. She demands that Congress also change the immigration law to remove from it the “racist” content that allows, among other things, foreign internment centers (the so-called CIE) or “racist raids”.
In statements in Congress before the Permanent Deputation, Belarra was explicit in saying that the preamble of the Junts law “was not the only problem.” “The problem,” she explained, “is that they were delegating to Catalonia a law that is racist, which is the immigration law,” which allows “racist prisons” like the CIE and a “migration management” focused on “security” and that leads to raids “solely and exclusively based on skin color”.
The Podemos leader warned the PSOE and Junts that “if they want to negotiate” they already know what Podemos’ proposal is, which is “to reform that text so that it is not racist,” both in the “preamble” of the Junts law and in its “articles” so that, thus, a “delegation of powers with a human rights approach and that protects the rights of migrants” can be made.
Likewise, Podemos does not consider fulfilled another of its major conditions, which was the regularization of migrants agreed with the government in exchange for its future support of the Junts proposal. The process, which has reached 1.2 million applications, continues resolving cases but for the morados “it is not working as it should,” so it demands more agility in the procedures and that the government “fulfill” what it agreed.
In any case, the latter seems that sooner or later will be resolved. The immigration law issue appears to be the real matter that entrenches the situation. “All those elements have to be reviewed,” Belarra insisted, from an inflexible position that threatens to block the text.
For now, there are no open negotiations or contacts. “When a parliamentary group proposes a proposal through the media, usually the goal is not to negotiate, but rather to pressure,” Belarra added.
As for the text presented again by Junts, the articles are exactly the same. The goal, said the Junts spokesperson in Congress, Míriam Nogueras, is “not to give them any excuse” to vote against the text again. The also vice president of the Catalan independentist party has claimed the approval of this law as “one of the great solutions to the Ceuta crisis so that Catalonia can decide migration flows”.
“Catalonia does not have infinite reception capacity. We can no longer attend to the Catalonia of eight million, therefore, the Catalonia of ten million of Illa and the socialists is not only unfeasible but irresponsible,” Nogueras argued. “They are putting the Catalan model and our welfare state at risk, and they lead us to precariousness and to continue impoverishing the middle and working class of Catalonia.”
The delegation of migration powers was one of the main agreements reached between the PSOE and Junts before Puigdemont declared their relationship broken in October last year. The blocking of the law in Congress was one of the main reasons the secessionists justified the end of the legislative agreement with the socialists, besides not having achieved the official status of Catalan in the European Union.
