The Ministry of Social Rights intends to convene the Sectoral Conference on Childhood shortly to agree with the autonomous communities on referrals of unaccompanied foreign minors from the Canary Islands to the Peninsula, given the saturation of the Archipelago's services.
The meeting, explain sources from Social Rights to EFE, was already planned before the arrival of the latest cayucos to El Hierro, where this Tuesday the largest cayuco seen to date on the Canary route arrived with 271 people on board, 75 of them minors, according to the Red Cross count.
The General Directorate of Childhood has been meeting in recent weeks with regional officials to study the referrals and it is expected that the first solidarity distribution of 2023 will be agreed upon at the Sectoral Conference.
Last year, the different administrations agreed to transfer 400 unaccompanied foreign minors from the Canary Islands and Ceuta to the peninsula in 2022, with financial support from the State, and that 374 would be referred this year, a figure that Social Rights hopes will be expanded.
"The will of this Ministry, and of the entire Government, is to guarantee that minors are cared for and that the autonomous communities have the relevant tools at their disposal to do so," the sources consulted emphasize.
The president of the Cabildo of El Hierro, the socialist Alpidio Armas, has expressed his concern because, although it is expected that 90% of the adults who have arrived by boat will leave the island this Wednesday, about 200 unaccompanied minors will remain.
For his part, the vice president of the Canary Islands Government, Manuel Domínguez (PP), has urged the central Executive to coordinate the referrals of minors with the different communities in the face of the collapse of the archipelago's reception network.
In statements to the media and when asked about his predisposition to urge autonomies presided over by the PP to welcome migrant minors arriving on the islands, Domínguez said that what he is going to ask is "that the President of the Government treat the migratory issue of the Canary Islands as a State problem."
"That he be the one to manage and coordinate the referral of immigrants to the rest of the autonomous communities, but that he also involve the European Union in this," he said.
In the autonomous communities governed by the PP, he admitted, "there are those who think one thing and there are those who think another."
