Thousands of unaccompanied minors face abuse crisis in overcrowded Spanish enclave

At eight in the morning, the Tarajal industrial park in Ceuta should be alive with the sound of forklifts and shipping containers. Instead, cardboard tents dot the landscape, and children sleep under filthy blankets where trucks once parked. Between three and five thousand unaccompanied minors are now living in this Spanish enclave on Africa's northern coast, a number that has overwhelmed every shelter and facility the city can offer. Some nights, there is simply nowhere left to sleep but the street.

Amina is fourteen. She crossed from Morocco into Spain in late July with her brother, part of a wave of roughly eighty thousand people who surged across the border in a single month. Most have since moved on, but about nine thousand remain in Ceuta—many of them children like Amina, separated from guardians or traveling alone. She sits in the industrial park and describes the most basic indignity: there are no toilets. When she needs to relieve herself, she must venture into the bushes, but she will not go alone. The fear is not abstract.

Nearby, a Moroccan woman named Malika has arranged blankets for herself and four children. She worked as a cleaner back home, earning the equivalent of seven euros a day—not enough to feed a family, let alone buy school supplies or clothes when the academic year begins. She saw the crossing advertised on social media and decided to try. Now she is trapped in a different kind of poverty, one without walls or running water. Her youngest fell ill with a high fever. She could not find a doctor, so she made compresses from water and vinegar and hoped. But her real terror centers on her daughters, ages twelve and fourteen. Sexual assaults have spiked dramatically in the past week. Police are investigating at least fifteen suspected cases of rape. Local officials believe the true number is far higher.

Dr. Susana Ascaso works in the emergency room at Ceuta University Hospital. Just yesterday, a twelve-year-old girl arrived in tears, having been harassed and touched inappropriately by other migrants she encountered on the street. A stranger found her and brought her to safety. Ascaso has treated several young girls in recent days, all with similar stories. The problem is structural: there are far more male migrants than female, and the girls have nowhere safe to be. They are, as Ascaso puts it, particularly at risk.

Ceuta's leadership has begun using language that suggests they have lost control. Nabila Benzina, the regional minister for health and social affairs, called this the worst moment in Ceuta's history. Juan Jesus Vivas, the city's president, said the enclave is currently operating at five thousand percent over capacity for minors—a figure that sounds absurd until you understand what it means: nobody can adequately care for them. There is no system left. Vivas has called for the Spanish central government in Madrid to intervene, to reunite minors with families in Morocco or to have Moroccan social services take responsibility. But the Spanish government has announced only vague plans to transfer some minors to the mainland, with no timeline. Several regions controlled by the far-right Vox party have already refused to accept any migrants at all.

Yet many of the children say they will not return to Morocco or anywhere else in Africa, despite everything. Ibrahim is seven years old, from Sudan. He says he will not give up until he can provide a better life for his parents back home. Amina, at fourteen, refuses to go back. The schools in Morocco are failing, she says. She wants something different. She wants to become an architect. It is a small ambition, ordinary and human, and it exists in sharp contrast to the cardboard tent where she sleeps and the bushes where she cannot safely go alone. The Spanish government has not yet said what will happen to her.