The funnel of the reception of unaccompanied minors in the Canary Islands: “The State has to react”

It has been a year since Hakim embarked on a boat to Gran Canaria. At the age of 16, he left Morocco on a wooden barge in search of a good future. The trip lasted four days. There were 50 other people on the boat, but he was alone. His family stayed in Marrakech. Sketching a shy smile, he says that in his hometown he was a carpenter. With the little he earned and the salary of his father, who worked as a barber, the two of them and his mother, who worked at home, were able to make ends meet.

Hakim is one of the 5,065 unaccompanied minors under the guardianship of the Canary Islands Government, following the spike in migrant arrivals in recent months. An increase that has once again put to the test the reception system in the Archipelago and has reopened the unresolved question of the distribution in the rest of Spain of the reception of minors arriving in the Islands, something that the regional government has been demanding since the humanitarian emergency of 2020.

Most of the migrants who entered Spain last year did so through the Canary Islands. The Archipelago beat its record number of arrivals, with the rescue of 39,910 survivors. The presence of children and adolescents on the Atlantic route also increased in 2023, a trend that continues this January. “Arrivals are already a constant. There are no months without arrivals of minors. Only in the first two weeks of January, around 49 have arrived”, explains the Deputy Minister of Social Welfare of the Canary Islands Government, Francisco Candil. In view of this situation, the president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, last week asked the central government to carry out a “mandatory distribution” to the other autonomous communities, with a distribution based on criteria of GDP per capita, population or surface area.

According to Candil, a single territory taking in minors in times of upturn can result in children’s rights being violated. “In the Canary Islands there have been times when there have not even been bunk beds. We have had to do everything to respond to the arrivals,” he says. In October 2023, the Ministry of Social Rights and Agenda 2030 agreed, within the framework of the Sectorial Conference on Children and Adolescents, to distribute 347 minors arriving in the Canary Islands to the Peninsula. In spite of this pact, from June to date there have been no referrals to other communities, according to sources from the Canary Islands Government.

Age determination tests

In the last few days, three ten-year-old children have arrived at the Tenerife center where Hakim lives. His photos crown his room, adorned with stuffed animals and games. “The profiles have changed. Younger and younger children are arriving,” says the center’s director, Patricia Lago. Establishing the age of minors has been one of the elements that has aggravated the crisis in the Archipelago.

During the 2020 emergency, the age-testing cap pushed children to live with adults up to 40 years old in the same centers. Now, of the 5,065 minors under guardianship in the Canary Islands, at least 1,000 are awaiting a test to determine their age, according to the Vice-Ministry. For her part, Teseida García, the foreigners’ prosecutor for the province of Las Palmas, assures that things are working better than they did three years ago. “The waiting lists we have are normal considering how many people there are,” he explains.

The Prosecutor’s Office has reinforcement staff and boasts good coordination with NGOs, the National Police and the Institute of Forensic Medicine. For Garcia, the commitment in the first reviews is key: “I do not admit that they bring me a file of an obvious minor, nor of a man who is seen at first glance to be older”.

Sometimes, it is the entities responsible for the adult centers themselves that detect minors in the facilities. “In those cases we take longer because we have to assess the documentation they have,” says Garcia. “We always call the minors, listen to them and ask them about those documents. We even value the photos they send to their cell phones. Medical proof is always the last option,” he adds. The reliability of these tests has been questioned by different child advocacy organizations, as they use patterns of U.S. and non-African children.

Garcia recalls that the age determination decree is “provisional”. “The problem that the autonomous community is going to face will be the revision of the decrees. When these children begin to present papers, the decrees will have to be reopened and each and every piece of evidence will have to be evaluated,” the prosecutor emphasizes. The Alien Prosecutor is also in favor of speeding up the transfers to the Peninsula, but insists on the importance of determining the age of all minors in the Canary Islands before relocating them. “Otherwise, it would be a disaster. If we send them without the age determination they totally lose protection because we lose sight of them,” he notes.

The challenge of inclusion

For the Alien Prosecutor, the blocking of all young people in the Canary Islands goes against the best interests of the child. “The fact that the Archipelago has to take care of and train 5,000 minors means that they have fewer opportunities than those in any other city with fewer children in care,” he says. The Deputy Minister of Social Welfare also takes this line: “The State should react. It is not only about giving them a roof and food, but also schooling, health care and integration”.

Next to Hakim, in the dining room of the reception center, is Seidou. He was born in the Fatick region of Senegal and arrived in Tenerife in 2019 on a cayuco with more than a hundred people. I was 12 years old then and didn’t know where I was going. I had never heard of the Canary Islands before, only Madrid or Barcelona. With a strong Canarian accent, he recalls his trip: “It lasted a week and two days. Another boy and I were the only ones who had food on the skiff because we were the smallest”. He and Hakim are now 17 years old, and have found in soccer, their friends, love and music the keys to their inclusion. “Our favorite singers are Anuel and Morad,” they laugh.

Patricia Lago, a social educator and director of one of the reception centers in the archipelago, maintains that the Canary Islands have a “very powerful” reception system. “Before, the system was more assistance-oriented. Today, educators act as guides and try to make the children the protagonists of their own lives,” he says. According to the educator, the islands take into account the needs of young people, their culture and their emotions. “We’ve moved away from having the figure of a watchdog to giving them the tools to make their decisions,” he says.

Contact with families in origin is key. Hakim, Seidou and their center mates talk to their loved ones by video call every day. “It gives them a lot of peace of mind. It also gives peace of mind to their families and to us, the educators. They support the kids from there and we go in the same direction,” Patricia Lago points out.

For the educator, one of the pending challenges of the system lies in professional training. “Sometimes they are required to comply with bureaucratic requirements that only those born here can have, such as having the ESO,” he says. On the other hand, the Canary Islands have been able to provide schooling for the youngest children. “The ten-year-olds arrived a few weeks ago, and they are already in school,” he celebrates.

The Department of Social Rights assures that one of the main lines of work being pursued is the training of minors in difficult-to-employ work activities, especially in the primary sector, the service sector and construction. The purpose is to enable them to get a job when they reach 18 years of age.

Extruded persons

Another objective of the Government of the Canary Islands is that all migrants have their documentation before they reach the age of majority. At this point they encounter little cooperation from the consulates of the countries of origin. “I imagine it’s because of the complexity of getting the papers,” adds Francisco Candil.

Vania Oliveros, a lawyer specializing in immigration and children, says she and her colleagues are faced with “two realities”. While the administration assures that all migrants leave with documentation, in their day-to-day work they verify that “this is not the case”. “We understand that there are a large number of pateras, but the problem is that the number of professionals in the administration remains the same,” says the lawyer. The main consequence: many young people leave the system in an irregular administrative situation.

In these cases, collaborating lawyers and civil organizations are in charge of helping the ex-custodial detainees to process all the documentation to obtain residency. “The rights of children and young people are violated because the system is not provided with human and structural resources. In a territory that is always receiving migrants, we continue to resort to improvisation,” criticizes Oliveros.

For the lawyer, it is not enough to provide an entity with a budget to cover the basic needs of minors. “Children’s rights are not being looked after as they should be,” he asserts. Among the main shortcomings is the lack of specialization in the sector and of personalized attention that takes into account the special vulnerability of migrant minors.

On the margins of the host system

The system in the Canary Islands has also shown its shortcomings in recent months. On November 24, 20 minors escaped from a shelter in Gran Canaria and reported physical aggression, humiliation and sexual abuse to the courts. Eight of them returned to the center a few hours later, but the others spent up to five nights on the street until the Canary Islands Government relocated them to other spaces. At that time, the regional government justified that the technicians sent to inspect the center had not been able to confirm the facts reported.

The device from which they fled is managed by the Fundación Respuesta Social Siglo XXI, which has already been involved in other scandals in the Canary Islands. Four of its directors are being investigated for embezzlement of public funds, after the Prosecutor’s Office denounced that they used the money for the minors for personal beauty treatments, slippers, luxury hotels and Viagra.

Moha is another of the minors who, although he arrived alone in Lanzarote, is out of the foster care system. His case is even more serious. When he set foot in the Canary Islands he was arrested, accused of being the skipper of the zodiac in which he was traveling. Despite being a minor, he spent three months in Tahíche prison. “I was there until my lawyer got my birth certificate,” she says. Moha arrived at the age of 15, but knowing he could go to a juvenile facility led him to say he was four years older. “What I wanted was to work and send money home,” he says now.

Some of his fellow passengers pointed him out as the captain of the dinghy, and that was enough to get him locked up. His lawyer, Sara Rodríguez, says that she went to the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) with a birth certificate and an age determination report that said the minimum age range was 16. Even so, the Court concluded that he should be tried as an adult because upon his arrival he declared himself to be an adult. The case is now before the Supreme Court. In the meantime, Moha lives with a relative in Tenerife, although according to legal sources, he should be in a regional government shelter. “It’s a good thing I have him. Otherwise, I’d be out on the street,” he says.

* The names of the minors appearing in the report are fictitious to protect their identity.

** This report has been made in collaboration with Canarias Ahora.