The first week of the extraordinary regularization (started on April 20) has caused a total collapse of public services throughout the country. The offices of Foreign Affairs, Social Security, and Postal Service are overwhelmed, and thousands of people are experiencing a true bureaucratic odyssey full of uncertainty and frustration.
In just five days, more than 60,600 applications have been registered throughout Spain. The schedules are practically exhausted and very few appointments remain available. Many applicants face the desperate reality that there are no slots until June or even later.
The situation is especially dramatic in Catalonia, the region with the highest concentration of migrants:
- In L'Hospitalet de Llobregat they had to open the La Farga fairgrounds, where they attend to more than 2,000 people per day.
- The Ibn Battuta Foundation in the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona was forced to close its doors: it already has 8,000 appointments booked through June and cannot attend to anyone else.
- Barcelona urgently activated four new walk-in service points.
- In Badalona, they only distribute 270 daily slots, and even so, the lines are endless.
The main civil servants' union CSIF has harshly denounced the Government's "poor planning and improvisation":
- Constant failures in the old Mercurio platform (it only allows 15 MB of documents).
- Serious lack of staff and insufficient training.
- Entire families come with a single appointment, which multiplies service times.
- Many offices close at 9:00 PM, leaving workers exhausted.
Thousands of applicants go from one town hall and organization to another in search of certificates of registration and social vulnerability, with confusing information and hardly any appointments available. The general feeling is one of chaos and abandonment.
Catalan authorities estimate that in this community alone, between 120,000 and 150,000 people could benefit from the program. The second major wave of pressure will arrive in July, when the files are transferred to SEPE, Social Security, and the Police, and everything points to the situation getting worse.
(El País, El Mundo, and ABC, April 21-22, 2026)
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