Everything was fine. The food. The treatment. The attention. The services. Until the tourists left at the beginning of autumn. "From one day to the next, we went from being good families to bad families," explains a Syrian woman who is part of a large group of asylum seekers residing in Malgrat de Mar and who denounce the feeling of "abandonment" they have experienced since October. They claim to have found cockroaches in the food, to have been given flowery and expired food, to have had fleas in the rooms, for the heating not to have worked for months on one of the floors of the hotel where they are staying, for the hot water to have constant problems, and for being denied money to buy clothes or transportation tickets that they are entitled to.

Guillermo and Silvia's lawyer (not their real names) advised them to abandon the process for international protection they had begun in 2021, when they arrived from a Central American country they prefer not to reveal. Settled with their family in a town in Girona, they had both secured permanent contracts, contributing to Social Security "from day one" and hoping to put years of persecution and hardships of forced exile behind them. They say they already received an unfavorable ruling last fall and that with "the threat of May 20th," they decided to abandon their asylum applications, although this step means they are now in an irregular situation. The hardest part, they say, was having to inform company managers that they could no longer work legally.