Sánchez will chair this Friday the Ceuta Situation Committee while Torres accelerates returns: "The sooner the spaces are enabled, the sooner we can proceed"

The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, will chair this Friday by videoconference a new extraordinary meeting of the Situation Committee in charge of managing the migratory crisis in Ceuta. The meeting will follow up on the first meeting of the body, held this Wednesday and headed by the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, responsible for the single command created by the Executive to coordinate the response to the situation in the autonomous city.

Torres explained that the shared objective of the central Government and the City of Ceuta is to ensure that the people who remain in the city after the massive entry return to Morocco, always within the legal framework. To advance in this process, the minister considers it necessary to enable specific spaces where those who remain in Ceuta can be identified and registered.

“We share the objective of return in accordance with the law,” Torres said after the first meeting of the Specialized Situation Commission in Ceuta. The minister stressed that, to make this procedure possible, “it is necessary to register in delimited spaces the people who remain in the city.”

“The sooner they are enabled, the sooner returns can proceed,” added the head of the single command, who defended the need for adequate facilities to carry out the identification, triage, and referral process. The Executive has also decided to discard the sports centers initially contemplated as possible reception spaces and to look for other facilities that allow managing the situation without altering the usual functioning of the city. The discarding of these spaces is done at the request of the president of Ceuta, Juan Jesús Vivas.

Primera Comisión Especializada de Situación en Ceuta:

👉Compartimos el objetivo del retorno conforme a la ley.

👉Para ello es necesario filiar en espacios acotados a las personas que permanecen en la ciudad. Cuanto antes se habiliten, antes se podrá proceder a los retornos.… pic.twitter.com/dFEKKEPS0M

— Ángel Víctor Torres Pérez (@avtorresp) August 26, 2026

Call for coexistence

During the meeting, in which ten ministers and the president of Ceuta, Juan Jesús Vivas, participated, in addition to other officials from the administrations involved, Torres emphasized the need to maintain coordination between the central government and the Autonomous City to restore normality.

In this regard, the minister made a joint appeal to the citizenry: “The Government of Spain and the Government of Ceuta make a call for coexistence, of which Ceuta has always been an example.”

The Situation Committee will hold ordinary weekly meetings and may call extraordinary meetings when necessary. In addition, the working groups will hold two meetings each week to monitor actions and the evolution of the crisis.

This Friday's meeting, chaired by Sánchez from La Moncloa, will thus serve to continue specifying the measures adopted by the single command and advance in the management of returns, assistance to people remaining in Ceuta, and the search for suitable spaces for their identification and referral.