Gary, a 41-year-old lawyer, was the first of the family who fled Honduras last August harassed by criminal gangs, the maras. He landed in Barcelona on August 13, three days later he began to make an appointment on the official website to request asylum, as he had been told at the immigration office on Paseo Sant Joan in Barcelona. "They told me that I had to connect on Mondays and Fridays between 8 and 12, that those days enabled between 20 and 50 places, but I never succeeded, it always appeared on the screen: "At this moment there is no appointment in this province" , says Gary. August, September, October, November... Nothing. His wife and two daughters, aged 18 and 15, also flew to Barcelona in October, escaping the pressure of organized crime. It wasn't until the 7th February, six months after the first attempts, when Gary got a positive response: on April 26 and 28 they finally had an appointment for the interview with the national police, thus obtaining the provisional NIE and being able to access the state program of reception.
Gary is one of the 118,842 people who requested asylum in Spain in 2022, compared to 65,404 the previous year. In Catalonia there were 10,396 compared to 8,519 in 2021. The first requesting country is Venezuela (45,748), followed by Colombia (36,012), Peru (8,937), Morocco (3,905) and Honduras (3,017). Gary has offered her testimony today to make visible the collapse suffered by foreigners, which is leading many refugees to destitution, as denounced by Elena Maya, co-director of the Comissió Catalana d'Acció pel Refugi (CCAR). "The waiting time to make an appointment on the national police website is four to six months for families and up to a year for single people," Maya said. The impossibility of being attended encouraged "an illegal dating market", for between 30 and 250 euros you could choose to get a day and time for the interview. "To alleviate this situation, a hotline was launched in Barcelona this April, but it only remains operational for three hours a day, asylum seekers explain to us that it is extremely difficult for them to answer the call, and there is also no translation system," laments Maya. This situation, the slow response, has also caused families from other countries to find themselves on the streets, according to Maya.
Coinciding tomorrow with the celebration of World Refugee Day, the CCAR has presented a report confirming the upward trend in forced displacements around the world after the impasse of the covid years. In 2022, 104 million displaced persons were registered as a result of wars, persecutions and violations of human rights, 15% more than in 2021.
In Spain, during 2022, 59.5% of the total 87,000 applications analyzed were rejected. 16.3% were given the green light and 24% obtained protection for humanitarian reasons.
Gary and his family currently reside in a room in a hostel near Barcelona, following the state reception program. "My wife and I are studying Catalan and we haven't signed up for a nursing assistant course, my eldest daughter is taking another on oral hygiene and the little one is in ESO", says Gary, satisfied to feel safe but aware that this new stage it won't be easy either.
