Photo credit: Los Angeles Times
It wasn’t easy for migrants in Spain as police in the country carried out eviction orders on Wednesday to clear an abandoned school building where around 400 of them were living in a square north of Barcelona.
The AP reports that, knowing that the eviction order was coming, most of them had left to try to find other shelters before police in riot gear entered the premises under court orders. Judicial authorities had ruled the building unsafe.
While the eviction was completed without violence, there were moments of tension when people who were losing their homes had to walk past armoured officers.
However, the police detained 18 people on suspicion that they were residing in the country without authorization, lawyer Marta Llonch said.
The squat was located in Badalona, a working-class city near Barcelona. Many sub-Saharan migrants, mostly from Senegal and Gambia, had moved into the empty school building since it was left abandoned in 2023.
“Putting 400 people onto the street in winter just before Christmas, you have to have a hard heart to do that,” said Younous Drame, a Senegalese who was among the evictees.
The judicial order ruled that the Barcelona town hall should provide the evicted people with access to social services, bjut it did not oblige local authorities to find hiusing for all the squatters.
Llonch, who represents the squatters, said that many people would surely end up without shelter in the cold.
Many of the squatters lived from selling scrap metal collected from the streets. Others had residency and work permits, but were forced to live there because they couldn’t afford housing during a cost-of-living crunch that is making it difficult even for working Spaniards to buy or rent homes. That housing crisis has led to widespread social angst and public protests.
Upon leaving the school, people loaded their belongings onto carts, some of which were used as trailers and led by bicycles, to haul them away.
The Barcelona town hall will offer temporary housing to some 30 people, according to El Pais newspaper. Another 60 people are being attended to by Catalonia’s regional social services, which could end up offering them temporary housing as well, regional officers said.
The mayor of Badalona, a conservative, had asked the court to evict the migrants from the old public school.
His town hall had argued that the squat was a public safety hazard. In 2020, an old factory occupied by around a hundred migrants in the city caught fire, and four people were killed in the blaze.
After the eviction was complete, Garcia Albiol visited the school site and declared that “what is unacceptable in this country is that Spain’s government lets absolutely everyone in.”
Like other southern European countries, Spain has for more than a decade seen a steady influx of migrants who risked their lives crossing the Mediterranean or Atlantic in small boats.
While many developed countries have taken a hard-line position against migration, Spain’s left-wing government has said that legal migration has helped its economy grow.
