By Horaci García and Albert Gea
BADALONA, Spain, Dec 17 (Reuters) – Spanish police on Wednesday evicted hundreds of migrants from a former high school in the northeastern city of Badalona, in what a union representing local tenants described as the largest such eviction ever in Spain.
The building, long occupied by squatters, was cleared under orders from Badalona Mayor Xabier Garcia Albiol of the conservative opposition People’s Party (PP), whose views on migration clash with a more permissive stance of Spain’s leftist government.
Brief clashes erupted between riot police and activists and migrants, but most left peacefully carrying their belongings in carts or sat in the street with their luggage, with no other place to go.
Albiol justified the move by the need to fight illegality and crime, which he has often linked to irregular immigration, advocating deportations for offenders.
Spain’s central government has largely embraced migration, highlighting its economic benefits, at a time when other EU countries have been tightening borders and right-wing parties gaining traction with promises of tougher immigration controls.
The tenants’ union and other associations urged authorities to provide housing alternatives for the roughly 400 people evicted, but the migrants, such as 25-year-old undocumented Senegalese man Boubacar, said they had no choice but to sleep rough.
“Tonight our plan is to sleep in the street because we don’t know where to go. And as you can see, it’s raining right now and it’s cold, and we don’t know what to do. We’re going to have to sleep like this; it’s very hard,” said Boubacar, who only gave his first name.
In the same city five years ago, five people died when an industrial building caught fire with West African migrants inside.
(Writing by Emma Pinedo; Editing by Aidan Lewis)