Spain struggles to deport foreigners as countries shun their own criminals

According to Spanish law, the expulsion of foreigners from the country may be considered for offences that they class as serious or very serious.

Some of these offences are not as ‘serious’ as many people would think: overstaying your visa, working without a work permit or forging your town hall padrón certificate.

READ MORE: What can get foreigners deported from Spain

So when it comes to foreigners who commit undisputedly more serious crimes, Spanish authorities tend to favour the deportation of the foreign offender.

According to a newly released annual report by Spain’s Attorney General's Office, deportation proceedings went up by 42 percent in 2023, with a total of 6,729 expulsion cases at different levels of the process.

The Public Prosecutor's Office stressed that “in almost all cases the people expelled had criminal records, which showcases that deportations involve people who have exhibited criminal and antisocial behaviour.”

In total, 748 foreign nationals were actually deported from Spain in 2023, 596 with prison sentences of up to five years and 152 serving prison terms longer than five years.

Albanians represented the biggest group of deported foreigners (132), even though they are not among Spain’s biggest foreign population groups, a fact that police sources put down to the fact that many of those expelled belong to Albanian mafia groups.

READ ALSO: Can I move to Spain if I have a criminal record?

Colombian nationals (120) and Moroccan nationals (78) were the second and third most deported foreign nationals.

The nationalities of other expelled foreigners include Brazil (46), Georgia (43), Peru (34), China (25), Dominican Republic (22), Romania (16), Chile (17), Lithuania (16), Paraguay (15), Senegal (14), Serbia-Montenegro (11), France (8), Italy (6) and Argentina (6).

According to Spain’s Prosecutor's Office, there have been problems repatriating certain nationalities due to a lack of cooperation on the part of some foreign authorities.

Most notable of all are Algeria and Morocco, as diplomatic spats are used as an excuse to not accept their own delinquents. In the case of Algerian citizens, repatriations are currently completely paralysed.

“These countries do not recognise their citizens and do everything possible to prevent them from being returned," Spanish police sources were quoted as saying in online daily 20minutos.

There’s also the fact that many undocumented immigrants “try to create as many problems as possible to be identified, tearing up their passports or claiming to come from countries which have no deportation agreements with Spain.”

To make matters worse, “contradictory judicial sentences in different regional Public Prosecutor's Offices” are also preventing more deportations from happening, as is the ongoing judicial bottleneck affecting Spain.

There have even been cases of pilots refusing to fly the aircraft if a particularly violent or dangerous criminal is to be deported, such as the case last July of an Air Arabia pilot who claimed he would not take a Sahrawi activist from Bilbao to Morocco due to “security reasons”.