Madrid, forced to protect a minor who has lived on the street since March | Madrid

A judge has ordered the immediate re-entry of a minor who was expelled from the protection system of the Community of Madrid by an opinion of the Prosecutor’s Office, which he considered to be an adult and for which he had to live on the street in an abandoned situation during almost two months, coinciding with the coronavirus crisis. The minor, who was in the Hortaleza reception center, was expelled from there on March 10, a few days before the declaration of the state of alarm that forced the confinement of the population. The magistrate forces the Community to re-enter it in the guardianship system until its age can be determined with guarantees.

The Fundación Raíces requested a precautionary measure in which he recalled the situation of lack of protection to which he was forced when he was left on the street. In this sense, he explained that, although he applied to various organizations for a place, he has been rejected for being minor and for being saturated due to the virus. He was only able to take refuge during the last weeks in an occupied apartment, “in extremely precarious conditions, without electricity or water, leaving daily to go to the public toilets to clean up and get food in any way, at the risk of being sanctioned by the authorities” .

According to his passport and birth certificate, the minor, readmitted now, was born in The Gambia and is 17 years old. However, the Juvenile Prosecutor’s Office forced him to carry out medical tests to which he refused to submit, for which the Prosecutor’s Office decreed his age of majority, for which he was expelled from the center. The Raíces Foundation assures that the minor lived in The Gambia until he was 15 years old and that, after a journey of more than a year in different countries, he arrived in Spain in May 2019, crossing by boat from Nador, in Morocco, to Algeciras.

He also recalled that the Government has ordered to ensure the protection of young people under guardianship who reach the age of 18 or are declared of legal age during the state of alarm and that the Community of Madrid itself announced on March 24 that it would not expel from its centers residential to any youth in these circumstances. “None of those decisions came in time to protect this minor, who has had to go to court to be protected,” Paloma García, a lawyer for the foundation, said in a statement.

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