At El Trampolín beach, migrants say buses took them to the Morocco border after they were told their fingerprints would be taken and they would be moved to camps. The operation began on Sunday morning, when soldiers and security officers surrounded them, Omar says.
The buses left the area. Omar says they bypassed the CATE and went directly to the frontier. El Mundo reports that several people were told they would be registered and transferred to camps before being driven to Morocco.
RTVE reported that more than 70,000 people arrived from Morocco in Ceuta on July 30 and 31, leaving temporary settlements along the coast, including a camp of more than 500 migrants at El Guano.
The stated destination shaped the decision to board. Omar says Spanish agents told the group that Morocco had reached an agreement with Spain to return all the migrants. He says he did not choose to return and believed the bus was taking him to a reception facility.
The accounts surfaced after migrants were removed from several settlements in the autonomous city. The episode followed the clearing of El Guano, Ceuta’s last major migrant camp, described in an earlier camp report. Testimonies now focus on what happened after people were taken away from those sites.
Information from RFI, citing Spain’s Interior Ministry, more than 350 officers from different police units took part in the El Guano operation. It was described as the fifth such operation in Ceuta in several weeks.
Crossing the border did not end the journey. Omar says Morocco’s gendarmerie transported the group to cities far from the places where they had lived before reaching Spain. The process involved one transfer from the settlement to the frontier, followed by another from the frontier to distant Moroccan cities.
Ángel Víctor Torres, Spain's Minister for Territorial Policy, said people removed from the settlements were taken in small groups to the CATE for identity checks, with fingerprints taken as part of the process of verifying nationality. RTVE reported that the stated options were either voluntary return at the Tarajal crossing or registration at the CATE followed by accommodation. The disputed issue is what destination was communicated before boarding.
Two other migrants interviewed by El Mundo describe a similar route. They say they boarded buses believing they were heading to the CATE, then discovered they had been taken to the border. Both ended up hundreds of kilometres from their original cities in Morocco.
The testimonies do not show that all 1,823 cases followed the same path. They do reveal a sharp conflict between the official label and the experience described by at least three migrants. A return cannot be called voluntary when a person is told the bus is going to a camp and is instead taken across the border.
The government’s wider figures extend beyond the 1,823 returns linked to the operation described by the migrants. Torres said that 11,026 people had returned to Morocco since August 10: 10,513 were classified as voluntary returns and 513 as expulsions. RTVE reported that 2,783 departures took place during the nine days before October 8. That period coincided with large-scale beach operations, including the action at El Trampolín.
Official statements record the totals but do not say what each person was told or whether they gave written consent. They also omit where people were registered and the circumstances in which they boarded. The dispute could prompt scrutiny of identification procedures and access to asylum. It could also affect the legal classification of those returns.
If migrants were told they were going to the CATE but were taken to the border without informed consent, the two situations cannot be treated as identical in official records.
