Kicked out at 18 to live on the streets – a teenage migrant in Spain
Al Jazeera
Ilyas fled a life of poverty in Morocco at just 15; like others, he finds himself in desperate circumstances in Europe.
Barcelona, Spain – The morning he turned 18, the Spanish children’s centre that Ilyas* had been sheltering in for two years since he arrived across the border from Morocco unceremoniously kicked him out.
He wasn’t even permitted to stay for breakfast.
Now that he was an adult, the authorities said; he was on his own.
That was on January 30 this year and Ilyas – who doesn’t like to go by his real first name because of the shame he feels at being unemployed and homeless – left the centre for unaccompanied minors in the Spanish Ceuta enclave on the northern tip of Morocco and headed out in search of some other way to survive.
The small amount of pocket money a social worker gave him before he left Ceuta’s migrant minors’ centre paid for the ferry to the Spanish mainland port of Algeciras. There, he was approached by local social workers who recommended he travel 98km (61 miles) up to the city of Jerez where a place in a facility for young migrants was vacant, they said.
