Her own scent haunted her. He showered every day but changed back into the same sweaty clothes. For 16 days he didn't have shampoo to wash his hair or a toothbrush. During her delivery, she got her period and survived bleeding for four days with just two pads, and more than two weeks with the same underwear. This woman and her two children slept on the floor for a week and in a single bed for another ten days, all three packed together. No cell phone. “It was terrible to be there. We didn’t see the sun or the night,” remembers Andrea Martínez, a 27-year-old Colombian. Martínez and his two children, aged three and eight, are three of hundreds of people who have applied for asylum at Madrid-Barajas airport in recent weeks and have been forced to wait up to a month, crammed together, for the procedure to be accepted or not. request, another example of the collapse facing the Spanish asylum system. Your name is wrong. “I don’t want my testimony to harm my trial,” he asks.
Madrid airport has become a problem for the Interior Ministry. Since the summer, hundreds of people have taken advantage of their stopover in the capital to apply for asylum, a form recognized by law but which traditionally represents a minimum percentage of the total tens of thousands of applications registered in Spain. The peak of arrivals was felt in April, when an unusually large number of citizens arrived with Kenyan passports. These people, already numbering over 650 at the beginning of December, were actually Somali refugees who had bought a Kenyan passport for a few hundred euros in order to get into the transit area of the Spanish airport and apply for asylum. The latest figures contradict normality. According to the Ministry of the Interior, 2,861 applications for international protection were processed at Madrid Airport throughout 2023. But the reduction from December 1 last year to January 15 shows there were 847 requests in that short period. This is an unpublished number.
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The Somalis were followed by large groups of Senegalese and Moroccans, as well as travelers from Mauritania, Nepal and Latin America. According to a police list from last month accessed by EL PAÍS, the Senegalese are the largest nationality to arrive at Terminal 4 alone in the last month, with almost 200 people. They are followed by Kenyans (actually Somalis) and citizens originally from India. There are also a significant number of travelers whose nationality is not known because, according to police, they have lost their documents. Most of them took off from Casablanca Airport (Morocco). With a stopover in Madrid, their destination was primarily Latin American countries where an entry visa is not required for a large number of nationalities.
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Sleeping and shower area in unhygienic conditions in a room for asylum seekers at Madrid-Barajas Airport.
It has been a month since three judges called on the Interior Ministry and the National Police to take urgent measures to end overcrowding in Barajas, but far from being resolved, the situation has worsened. There were also two escapes involving 26 people two weekends ago.
Interior confirms it has sent reinforcements to expedite the interviews it needs to conduct with applicants. The number of state police officers increased from eight to 24 on weekdays and two trainers from the asylum office were sent, but the measure was not enough.
Foreign Affairs has also introduced a transit visa for Kenyan citizens to stop the influx of Somalis with purchased passports. The Unified Police Union (SUP) announced this Tuesday that it will also be imposed against Senegal on February 17, as confirmed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. What doesn't seem likely is that this will also be the case for travelers from Morocco. “This does not mean that we are restricting the right to asylum. We avoid instrumentalization on the scales,” emphasized Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska in Congress. For organizations working with refugees, the transit visa, which requires travelers to go through the embassy, complete paperwork and pay fees, is a Band-Aid that harms those who deserve protection. “This measure only makes travel temporarily more difficult. “Those who have to flee will continue to look for options due to a lack of legal and safe means,” criticizes the Director General of the Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid (CEAR), Estrella Galán.
The Interior Minister assured that this situation was “extraordinary” and was already being resolved. He said this shortly after the Red Cross, which employed 12 people to assist new arrivals and subcontract cleaning, announced a highly unusual decision: to leave. “You cannot work in these conditions,” the organization’s migration director, José Javier Sánchez Espinosa, told EL PAÍS. The cleaning has now been taken over internally.
It was precisely the Red Cross that Martínez visited several times during his long stay at the airport. She unsuccessfully asked for a toothbrush, more clothes, sanitary towels and a pair of flip-flops for her daughter. “They were always busy or there was none,” he complains. The girl, who had been left shoeless during the bed bug stampede, ended up wearing adult sandals that a police officer had cut with scissors to fit her small foot. “A few days later, I inherited some socks that a Honduran family had left me,” recalls the Colombian mother.
When a traveler arrives in the international transit area of the airport and wishes to apply for asylum, an express procedure will be opened to accept or reject their application and allow them to enter Spanish territory while their application is examined. But arrivals have exceeded legal deadlines and asylum seekers have been locked in incommunicado rooms in unsanitary conditions for up to a month. “It was reported that the average formalization time was between 10 and 12 days, although several people staying in the lounges of Terminals 1 and 4 reported that they had been on the airport premises between 20 and 25 days,” noted the ombudsman then made his visit on December 20th. “People are overcrowded and lack minimum conditions of hygiene and sanitation,” he added.
ombudsman
Andrea Martínez was present when the ombudsman appeared. Despite her vulnerable profile (a single woman with two minors), she remained in this limbo from December 8th to 24th. “When they took me to the first room, the one in Terminal 4, there were about 60 people there,” he remembers. “It was terrible. Three or four days went by without anyone coming to clean the toilets. Neither did the room. We all ate, dined and slept in the same place and that created a lot of rubbish and dirt “But nobody picked it up,” he explains. The family didn't have a bed in this room, so Martínez grabbed a mat about three fingers thick, put it on the floor and sat his children on it. They slept on a few sheets, too which she covered the ground. So six days passed. On the morning of the seventh day the agents shouted at her.
– Take everything out!
The room was full of bed bugs. “They were quite rude, they insulted the Somali women who didn't understand anything,” says Martínez. That night they all slept on the floor of another room. No bed linen, mind you.
The group landed in the Terminal 1 room the next day. At least there was natural light and space in the bunk beds. The three were stuck in one of the beds for another ten days.
Martínez managed to have the asylum interview on December 19, 11 days after landing in Madrid, during which it had to be decided whether his application would be accepted for processing. In an initial analysis, this was rejected and the return to Bogotá was ordered. “I was on the run, I couldn’t come back,” he explains.
The Asylum and Refugee Office considered that his history of persecution related to organized crime operating in his country contained “uncredible, inadequate and contradictory” claims. Here UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, stepped into action, claiming that the delay Martínez faced had damaged her testimony and that the woman had posed as a protected person. “It is not possible to rule out the negative effects of these conditions [las que concurrían en las salas] “The applicant may have had a claim for damages at the time of formalization and throughout the processing of the entire procedure,” the file says. UNHCR has expressed “concern” to the media about the situation of overcrowding and sanitary conditions and has asked for coordination.
Martínez's request was ultimately accepted and she was released on Christmas Eve. “I felt very happy, I cried a lot because I thought I would spend more days there with my children. My stay there was not much different than that of a prison in Colombia,” the woman claims.
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