The communities governed by the PP will not attend the Sectoral Conference on Thursday regarding the relocation of some 3,000 unaccompanied migrant minors, considering that the Government intends to impose a "forced" and "illegal" distribution that violates the principle of territorial equality.
The meeting is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. under the presidency of the Minister of Youth and Childhood, Sira Rego, and a heated discussion was anticipated, given that some PP autonomous communities had shown strong opposition to the Government's proposal and have appealed to the Constitutional Court against the decree in which it was approved.
The Government's idea, which it already conveyed to the communities in preparation for a preparatory meeting, is to relocate some 3,000 unaccompanied migrant minors from the Canary Islands, Ceuta, and Melilla to other territories, mostly to Andalusia, the Community of Madrid, and the Valencian Community.
The distance is such that the Sectoral Conference is reached without an approved agenda, after it was rejected by a majority in the previous Sectoral Conference, which for the Popular Party makes the call for this Thursday "illegal."
"I have to say that I am not optimistic," ventured this Wednesday the Minister of Territorial Policy and head of the Interministerial Immigration Commission, Ángel Víctor Torres.
In addition to the PP governments, the government of Castilla-La Mancha has also expressed opposition, warning that the proposed figure is "unaffordable" with the accompanying funding.
The total number of transfers from the archipelago that the Government is working with is 3,975, from which it will predictably be necessary to subtract around a thousand from the Canary Islands who will finally be welcomed by the state international protection network as asylum seekers, according to the order issued by the Supreme Court last March.
According to these data, which do not yet take this into account, the autonomous communities that would welcome the most young people would be Andalusia, with 677 young people; Madrid, with 647; and the Valencian Community, with 571, while Catalonia and the Basque Country would not have to welcome any. Even so, Catalonia has announced its intention to attend to at least 31.
"They are people to protect, not packages to distribute," they have denounced from the PP, which accuses the Government of using minors as a political shield with a distribution designed to confront the communities with each other by applying arbitrary criteria, without consensus, and with the sole objective of excluding Catalonia and the Basque Country, its parliamentary partners in Congress, from the distribution.
The Government's forecast to be debated this Thursday also includes the distribution of the 100 million euro fund contemplated in the royal decree law approved on March 18 to reform article 35 of the immigration law and create this referral mechanism.
According to these data, the Canary Islands would be the one that would receive the most resources, 24,268,200 euros, followed by Madrid, with 15,803,550 euros, and Andalusia, with 8,834,850.
The Popular Party believes that there is a "real risk of collapse" of the child protection systems that, they say, are already operating at the limit of their capacity, and they demand that the Government take charge "directly and with its own funding" of the care of unaccompanied minors in emergency situations such as the one in the Canary Islands or Ceuta or that other territories may suffer.
The confrontation also reaches the minor asylum seekers, for whom the Government has announced 1,200 state-owned places after the Supreme Court has forced it to take charge of them.