The Ministry of the Interior has enabled the garage of the National Police of Arrecife this past Sunday to house migrants. The arrival of hundreds of people over the weekend has collapsed the Temporary Foreigners Reception Center (CATE) in the capital of Lanzarote, with capacity for almost 300 people, and has pushed the portfolio led by Grande-Marlaska to seek new alternatives.
Initially, last Friday several tents were set up on the Puerto Naos dock to accommodate the migrants who were arriving on the coast of Lanzarote, given the lack of permanent resources and the CATE being full. However, the heat wave that hit the island forced them to look for a plan B. According to the newspaper El País, the National Police guarded about a hundred people in the Arrecife police station on Sunday morning. To do this, the agents "took their vehicles and patrol cars out of the garage" and spread yoga mats to accommodate them.
The Unified Police Union of the Canary Islands (SUP) has also spoken out along these lines, through X, where they have denounced that the transfers of migrant people in the Archipelago are being carried out without security measures, "chaos" in the CATEs and that police station garages are being enabled for police custody. As this union has confirmed to La Voz, this scene was also repeated in a National Police station in the south of Tenerife.
During the afternoon of this Sunday and after carrying out several transfers planned during the weekend to other islands, the manager of the Security and Emergency Consortium of Lanzarote, Enrique Espinosa, assured that the police station would be "empty" of migrant people and they would be transferred to the CATE and other islands.
