Spanish police evict migrants from school building

Police in northeastern Spain carried out eviction orders on Wednesday to clear an abandoned school building where hundreds of mostly undocumented migrants were living in a squat north of Barcelona.

Knowing that the eviction in the middle of winter was coming, most of the occupants had left to try to find other shelter before police in riot gear from Catalonia’s regional police entered the school’s premises early in the morning under court orders. Those who had waited left peacefully.

The squat was located in Badalona, a working-class city that borders Barcelona. Many sub-Saharan migrants, mostly from Senegal and Gambia, had moved into the empty school building since it was left abandoned in 2023.

The mayor of Badalona, Xavier García Albiol, announced the evictions in a post on X. “As I had promised, the eviction of the squat of 400 illegal squatters in the B9 school in Badalona begins,” he wrote. The judicial order obliged the Badalona town hall to provide the evicted people with access to social services, but it did not oblige local authorities to find housing for all the squatters.

Lawyer Marta Llonch, who represents the squatters, said that many people would surely end up without shelter in the cold. “Many people are going to sleep on the street tonight,” Llonch told The Associated Press. “Just because you evict these people, it doesn’t mean they disappear. If you don’t give them an alternative place to live, they will now be on the street, which will be a problem for them and the city.”

Many of the squatters lived from selling scrap metal collected from the streets. Others had residency and work permits but were forced to live there because they couldn’t afford housing during a cost-of-living crunch that is making it difficult even for working Spaniards to buy or rent homes. That housing crisis has led to widespread social angst and public protests. On leaving the school, people loaded their belongings onto carts, some used as trailers led by bicycles, to haul them away. García Albiol, of the conservative Popular Party, has built his political career as Badalona’s long-standing mayor with an anti-immigration stance.

The Badalona town hall had argued that the squat was a public safety hazard. In 2020, an old factory occupied by around a hundred migrants in Badalona caught fire, and four people were killed in the blaze. Like other southern European countries, Spain has for more than a decade seen a steady influx of migrants who risked their lives crossing the Mediterranean or Atlantic in small boats. While many developed countries have taken a hard-line position against migration, Spain’s left-wing government has said that legal migration has helped its economy grow.