Children ‘beaten at migrant camps’ on Spanish holiday islands

Migrant children kicked and headbutted at facilities in Canary Islands currently housing over 5,000 young people

Migrant children held on Spanish holiday islands have been kicked, headbutted and locked up in vastly overcrowded camps where nightclub bouncers are being drafted in to help with security, it has been claimed.
Children were allegedly assaulted by staff in facilities across the Canary Island currently housing 5,293 children, which is almost 2,000 above capacity. Some have also been held in warehouses previously used to breed pigeons.
The overcrowding is the result of a major surge in migrants travelling the dangerous route from West Africa to Spain along the Atlantic before arriving in Europe on small boats.
Many of the children arrive unaccompanied and must be cared for by island officials, while adults travel further into the continent or seek unofficial employment as the processes for deportation or asylum play out.
The crisis has caught politicians off guard and sparked a row with the mainland, which is refusing to take a share of the minors.
Politicians were left bickering over a solution as human rights groups said children at the centres were suffering because of inadequate security.
Vania Oliveros, a Tenerife lawyer specialising in immigration law, told The Telegraph: “The centres need security personnel and there aren’t trained workers on the islands so they use nightclub bouncers.” 
“We have seen cases in which children have been slapped, headbutted and even slammed against the wall.
“The people doing this job should have proper training but this is often not the case,” she added.
Ms Oliveros is one of a group of lawyers compiling a dossier of alleged infractions of migrant minors’ human rights, which they have begun to share with public prosecutors in the Canary Islands.
One former worker from a centre in Tenerife described an adolescent boy being restrained by two former nightclub bouncers for refusing to get in a bath.
His legs were kicked from underneath him to force him into the water, and he hit his head on the side of the bathtub. 
“I asked him if he wanted me to help him to report the crime, but he said it would be worse for him because he didn’t have ID documents. These children are afraid,” said the former teacher, who did not wish to be named.
“I have seen them grab a boy and put him in a chokehold until he fainted,” said another former worker from the same centre. 
Ms Oliveros also said children being temporarily housed in a hotel in Puerto de la Cruz were being locked alone in rooms used as isolation cells. 
“The usual amount of time they are shut in is three to four days,” the lawyer said. “They don’t understand why they are being punished; these children all say they want to study and to work.”
A further 300 children sleep on bunk beds in the windowless hangar of a building once used to breed homing pigeons, one of several facilities run for the Canary Islands government by an NGO called Quorum Social 77.
Quorum Social 77 and Juana de la Rosa, the director general of the Canary Islands’ child protection authority, declined to comment when contacted by The Telegraph.
Ms de la Rosa stressed in recent statements that the archipelago could not cope with the number of migrant children arriving and said other regions of Spain should help.
“We cannot keep on doing this alone,” she told newspaper El País.
Only 50 children have been flown to the mainland for housing in 2024, according to the Canarian government. 
Fernando Clavijo, the Canarian president who leads the authority, blamed the Spanish government for abandoning the islands in a year where the number of migrant arrivals by boat is set to break records. 
More than 25,000 people have made the crossing so far in 2024, including close to 3,500 minors.
Mr Clavijo has hinted that his administration will soon refuse to care for migrant minors. This week, he passed a new protocol under which children must be identified and registered in Spain’s national child registry before the regional government will accept them.
With existing bottlenecks in the processing of new arrivals likely to worsen, the Canarian government began installing a large tent for child migrants arriving on El Hierro, which has become the focus of a new route for the skippers of migrant boats. 
Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish president, blames the main opposition People’s Party for previously refusing to back legislation that would have triggered obligatory transfers of migrant minors between regions in such instances of localised saturation.