An email from the Ceuta Minors Area alerted the Prosecutor's Office that the return of minors would not be done according to the law

"The procedure is not in accordance with national, European and international legislation", the director of the area left in writing

An email sent by the director of the Ceuta Minors Area, Antonia Palomo, to the Ceuta Minors Prosecutor, José Luis Puerta, warned days before the return of unaccompanied minors to Morocco in August 2021 that the procedure was going to follow was not in accordance with national legislation.

"In view of the fact that the procedure is not in accordance with national, European and international legislation, I am bringing it to your attention for the appropriate purposes," concluded that email, advanced by El Confidencial and to which Europa Press has had access, which It was sent on August 12, 2021, just after the person in charge attended a meeting at the border with Morocco in which the delivery of a part of those minors who entered Ceuta in the month of May was prepared.

This document is part of the summary that is followed in the Investigating Court number 2 of Ceuta against the Government delegate, Salvadora Mateos, and the Ceuta vice-president, María Isabel Deu, who are accused of a continuing crime of administrative prevarication by omitting "voluntarily and consciously the legal provisions and the procedure established in the current legal system".

In that email, Antonia Palomo explained that she was going to the Public Ministry because they are the ones who, under the Civil Code, must monitor the guardianship, foster care or custody of minors. And she explained that in that meeting at the border that she attended, Moroccan officials as well as the National Police and the Government Delegation were summoned.

She was required as a representative of the Ceuta Minors Area and the objective was "to coordinate a device for the return of unaccompanied minors". It should be remembered that this device was activated based on the 2007 Agreement with Morocco -never used before- and that it was paralyzed after several minors asked to appear before a judge before being returned.

Palomo, after attending that meeting "with people who claimed to be representatives of the Moroccan government," harbored doubts about how that return would be carried out. Specifically, in his 'mail' he highlights that the Moroccan authorities spoke of a bus that they had prepared with the intention of transferring the minors to the center of Martil.

Once in that center, they explained to him, they would proceed to search for the parents. But the person in charge of the Minors' Area was not convinced by this point, and in fact she assures that they were not told that they had established "any type of procedure." "The meeting ended without specifying the terms in which the repatriations were going to take place," she lamented in her email.

As he leaves in writing, representatives of the Tetouan prefecture and L'Entraide Nacionale, an organization belonging to the Ministry of Family, Solidarity, Equality and Social Development, attended on the Moroccan side.

This 'mail' is consistent with what the Vice President and Counselor for the Presidency and Institutional Relations of the Executive of Ceuta, María Isabel Deu, asserted in her statement as a witness before the Prosecutor's Office in December 2021, when she assured that "the head of the minors area always stated that the repatriation of the immigration law had to be applied" and not the 2007 agreement signed with Morocco.