Spanish police estimate upwards of 400,000 illegal migrants filed mass amnesty applications despite not having lived in Spain last year — one of the lax requirements imposed by the nation’s socialist government for the amnesty.
Tuesday, June 30, marked the last day for illegal migrants in Spain to file applications for the mass amnesty plan launched this year by the administration of socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Prospective beneficiaries of the amnesty had to only comply with a notoriously lax list of requirements, such as having lived in Spain before December 31, 2025, and demonstrate that they have “no criminal record and do not pose a threat to public order, public safety, or public health.”
While the Spanish government affirmed earlier this year that it expected “half a million” illegal migrants to receive the amnesty benefits, almost 1.3 million requests were filed as of last week.
Unnamed sources told the outlet El Español on Wednesday that about 400,000 of the 1.3 million applications are believed to have been filed by illegal migrants who “slipped through the cracks” and were not living in Spain on or before the amnesty’s cutoff date. The assertion is believed to have led to the staggering amount of 1.3 million applications filed. According to the sources, it was reportedly believed that a total of about 850,000 illegal migrants lived in Spain before the start of 2026.
“Given that the final number of applications, which has not yet been officially confirmed, will exceed 1.3 million, it appears that around 400,000 people have taken advantage of the process launched by Pedro Sánchez’s government, which points to widespread fraud,” El Español wrote in its report.
El Español pointed out that, as part of the guidelines established by the Spanish government, it is now up to the Inclusion, Social Security, and Migration Ministry and immigration officers to verify the authenticity of the documents submitted for each amnesty application. Police specialists in migration and border control officials will not be involved in the verification process.
Equally alarming, the Spanish newspaper reports that the nation’s police officers are on the trail of human trafficking rings that exploited the Schengen free travel area to move migrants from within Europe to Spain to take advantage of the government’s mass amnesty plans with and “line their pockets even further.”
“Whenever there are regularization processes, it’s clear that criminal gangs take advantage of the situation,” unnamed police sources told ABC, noting that this is an “operational reality” that has been observed and will continue over the coming months.
“With such short deadlines and such laughably low requirements, it’s a goldmine for the criminal gangs,” the sources stressed.
ABC noted that the impact of Schengen Area member Spain’s amnesty “extends beyond the entire region because it facilitates mobility within member states.”
Per the sources, police officers have detected “secondary” migrant movements of Pakistani, Algerian, and Moroccan migrants coming from Germany, France, and Italy. The sources affirmed that said migrants allegedly contacted trafficking mafias to get the lax documentation required to file amnesty applications in Spain. The migrants are reportedly believed to seek to return to the respective European nations that they were illegally residing at once they successfully attain amnesty paperwork from Spain.
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