Ceuta, Madrid requests 35.6 million from Brussels for border infrastructure

On August 28, the Spanish Interior Ministry quantified the planned investment for the borders of Ceuta and Melilla at 35.6 million euros and asked the European Union to finance it at a co-financing rate of 90%, meaning around 32 million to be covered by Brussels. The request goes through the European instrument for financial support for border management and visa policy. The planned infrastructure includes drones, maritime barriers and underwater detection devices along the border with Morocco.

This newspaper has been following the story since mid-August: on August 17 we wrote about the fourth visit by the Spanish government to the autonomous city and about two counts that did not match.

The application submitted to Brussels concerns border control, not reception, and is a conditional spending forecast: European funding depends on the Commission’s review, and until a decision is made the 32 million remain a requested item, not an available resource. The day’s dossier does not include a timeline for that review.

The second new element concerns the figures on people. The Interior Minister put the number of people still present in Ceuta at around 5,000, of whom around 1,500 are minors. This is a downward revision compared with the figures circulating in previous days: on August 26 Interior corrected the count of minors registered in the city from 2,168 — the figure from August 18 — to around 1,500, after removing duplicates found in the digital registries. On August 24, Vice President Cuerpo had spoken of over 2,900. According to the Ministry, the correction stems from a registration issue, not from transfers or departures.

One detail worth noting changes the reading of the figure: the approximately 1,500 also includes minors already placed under the protection services of the autonomous city before July 30, meaning people who are not part of the arrivals of recent weeks. In other words, the scope of the count is broader than the number suggests at first glance, and the comparison with previous data remains provisional until the Ministry publishes the full series.

On the ground, on August 27 Interior opened eight new work lines at the temporary care center set up in the El Tarajal industrial estate and sent a team of eleven people from the General Directorate for International Protection. The stated goal is to speed up the identification and processing phase, which is the bottleneck on which both transfers to the mainland and the management of space in the city depend.

Two measurable questions remain open. The first is the Commission’s decision on the Spanish application, which will determine whether and when the 32 million euros from Europe become actual spending. The second is the consistency of the registries: the correction from 2,168 to around 1,500 shows that the registration system produced duplicates for at least eight days, and every subsequent figure will need to be read together with its recording date.

Sources: El Cronista (source: Ministerio del Interior); La Moncloa (press release from the Ministerio del Interior); The Objective (source: Europa Press and Interior sources); El Independiente (source: Ministerio del Interior).