Tension soars in Playa Benítez after thirty migrants escape police cordon: twelve arrested

The National Police plans to transfer the migrants who spent the night in Playa Benítez to the temporary camp of Loma Colmenar, once they are registered at the Temporary Foreigner Care Center (CATE), located in the Tarajal warehouses. During the operation deployed this Monday morning, a group of between 20 and 30 migrant people managed to escape the police cordon and half a dozen of them were arrested.

According to the operation described by police sources, the National Police had lined up the between 300 and 400 migrants who had spent the night on the beach before accompanying them to the buses that were to transfer them to the CATE. At that moment, a group of about thirty ran across the sand towards the city center, which forced several agents to chase them, although they could only intercept less than half a dozen.

More than fifty agents and several vans

The rest of the group managed to escape the operation towards the city, evading the more than fifty agents and numerous vans. The officers had positioned themselves at the end of the promenade that leads to the urban center, precisely to avoid stampedes like the one that occurred during the transfer of 1,800 people from Playa del Trampolín to the Port.

In addition, more than five vans were placed on Playa del Trampolín, a few meters from Benítez, with the aim of preventing the more than 4,000 migrants who spend the night there from moving when they heard the noise of the operation.

Start of the eviction and transfer to the CATE

The deployment of the National Police began at 7:00 a.m. and, minutes before 8:00 a.m., about fifty riot police spread out on the sand and began to wake up the migrants. “Take your things and get out,” they told them, according to the consulted sources. The occupants of the shacks began to leave the place with their belongings and, according to the available information, they did so without offering resistance.

The agents lined up the migrants before accompanying them to the beach promenade, where buses are expected to arrive imminently for their transfer to the CATE. There, the National Police will proceed to register them before transferring them to the temporary camp of Loma Colmenar.

Reinforcement of the perimeter and security reasons

Police sources anticipate that access to Playa Benítez will be cordoned off in the Desalination Plant area to prevent it from being reoccupied by migrants after the eviction, as has happened on other occasions in the Trampolín. The intervention is due to security reasons, as the overflow of a dam is located there, where water is evacuated when the reservoir fills up due to rains, a season that began this Monday.

According to the same sources, the National Police introduced drones into the conduit that transports water from the reservoir to Benítez and confirmed, thanks to thermal cameras, that there are people living inside.