The Consell de Mallorca and the Government want to house migrant minors in Son Tous.

PalmThe Mallorca Council and the regional government want to create an emergency reception center for migrant minors in the former Son Tous barracks, although physically separate from the current Temporary Migrant Care Center (CATI). The president of the Mallorcan Institute of Social Affairs (IMAS), Guillermo Sánchez, has confirmed that they are studying the idea, shortly before the Council of Ministers, as planned, approves the royal decree that will detail the ordinary reception capacity of each of the autonomous communities and allow for the initiation of referrals of minors.

Mallorca, he stated, "is not prepared" to accommodate the 49 unaccompanied foreign minors who are expected to arrive in the Balearic Islands from the Canary Islands due to a lack of space and personnel to care for them. The IMAS child protection service, he explained, has 40 specific places for the care of foreign minors and currently 460 are under guardianship, a tenfold increase in its capacity. Sánchez has stated that, in this situation, they currently have little capacity to care for the foreign minors arriving on the coast of Mallorca, which in August already number around 40.

"We are looking for alternatives."

The Government's Director General of Immigration and Development Cooperation, Manuel Pavón, explained this Tuesday that, given the possibility that the regional government will not be able to stop the arrival of these 49 minors to the Islands—which they will request from the Supreme Court—the Ministry of Families, which is already in the process of dependency, is considering taking them. "We cannot take in any more and we have to look for alternatives. We did contact the Government some time ago to provide them," the president of IMAS stated when asked about the matter. In this context, the Council of Mallorca and the Government are already working on the possibility of creating an emergency initial reception space for the former Son Tous barracks, Sánchez announced. This would be, he explained, an emergency resource "different from the integration resources" already available to IMAS. "But having a high-capacity emergency facility would be optimal for us," he emphasized. Not only would it provide initial reception for unaccompanied minors, who potentially arrive in Mallorca from the Canary Islands, but also for those arriving on the coast in small boats. "It would be an additional resource; it wouldn't depend on the arrival method, but rather on the profiles. It would be an initial emergency reception resource for initial triage and then referral to other regular centers for their integration and training," he explained.

This facility, whose implementation is still in a "very early" stage, would be physically separated from the CATE (Center for Migration and Accreditation), where a large portion of the adult migrants arriving in Mallorca are transferred for registration by the National Police. In parallel with this project, the president of IMAS stated, they are working with the Ministry of Families, Social Welfare, and Dependency Care to find "other spaces where emergency and initial reception resources are available" for migrant minors arriving in Mallorca.