The Groningen village of Warffum will receive asylum seekers for four nights from Thursday to relieve the overcrowded registration center in Ter Apel. The municipality of Het Hogeland reported this in an email on Wednesday declaration.
The municipality received an urgent request from Minister of Asylum and Migration Bart van den Brink (CDA). This concerns temporary shelter for one hundred and fifty people. They spend the nights in the Warffum sports center and in the morning are driven by bus to Ter Apel, where they stay during the day.
In recent days, the city of Groningen arranged emergency shelter in a conference center. The city announced on Wednesday that it would keep the shelter open for one more night. Then it would be another municipality’s turn.
With Warffum, about eighty kilometers north of Ter Apel, it is once again a village in the north of the country that has to step in to relieve the pressure on the registration center. Last week, Stadskanaal and Gieten (municipality of Aa en Hunze) stepped up at the last minute to prevent asylum seekers from having to spend the night in the grass.
Hans Broekhuizen, mayor of Het Hogeland, notes in the statement that “once again Groningen municipalities show solidarity” with Ter Apel and that “insufficient support and solutions” are offered by other municipalities.
Groningen has more structural shelters than the province’s Distribution Act requires, as figures that the minister sent to the House of Representatives showed again in February. However, provinces such as South Holland and North Brabant remain well below this. According to the Distribution Act, approximately 38,000 places must be added throughout the country over the next year and a half.
After a debate on Wednesday afternoon, Van den Brink announced that there is not yet a structural solution to relieve the overcrowded registration center in Ter Apel. He does say that “several discussions” are ongoing with a number of municipalities about this.
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