Spain’s largest National Police union has told a parliamentary committee that Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s extraordinary migrant regularisation could ultimately put papers in the hands of four million people once family reunification is taken into account.
Jupol secretary-general Aarón Rivero appeared behind closed doors on September 14 before the working group set up by the Joint Congress-Senate Committee on National Security to examine the effects of the process.
He accused the Spanish Government of a “lack of foresight” and called the regularisation “very rushed”.
Ministers had said the process would cover about 500,000 people. When applications closed on June 30 the figure was more than double, with the Inclusion Ministry putting the total at about 1.17 million and police sources putting requests above 1.3 million.
Jupol’s estimate is that those grants could multiply by four through family reunification under Spain’s aliens law, taking the total to four million over the coming years.
Earlier internal police assessments had already put the ceiling at three million; specialist foreigner-and-borders reports circulated to the National Police leadership earlier this year spoke of at least one million regularisations dragging in an average of four relatives each, or four to five million people in all.
Estimates by the Spanish Government of the effects of a mass regularisation of illegal migrants are severely underestimating the real numbers, a report issued by the police has found. https://t.co/ofgYP6m0Bu
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) February 17, 2026
The decree, agreed with Podemos and pushed through without a parliamentary vote, applied to foreigners present in Spain before January 1, 2026 who could show at least five months’ continuous stay and no relevant criminal convictions.
Approved by cabinet as Royal Decree 316/2026 on April 14, it amended the regulations under the aliens law rather than the law itself and traces back to a citizens’ initiative backed by more than 700,000 signatures.
Proof could include the municipal register, medical appointments, social-service certificates, rental contracts, remittance receipts or travel tickets. Successful applicants received up to a year’s legal residence and a work permit, with five-year permits for children included in a family application.
By early July more than 600,000 of those who applied had already been admitted for processing and given provisional papers.
Jupol has separately alleged large-scale fraud. It says a General Commissariat for Aliens and Borders report flagged that some 400,000 applications did not belong to people who were in Spain during the required period, an estimate drawn from the gap between the roughly 850,000 irregular migrants police believed were in the country and the volume of files received.
No official confirmation that those applications are fraudulent has been produced.
The union called the eligibility rules “very lax”, warned of a pull factor and said criminal networks had “had a field day”.
It has also complained that officers were asked to process more than a million extra files without extra staff, that criminal records rather than police records were used as the filter, and that the “principle of authority” needed to be restored amid rising violence and organised crime. Rivero pointed to Sweden and the Netherlands as cases where he said a loss of police authority had let criminal organisations take hold.
Rivero presented CENIF (Centro Nacional de Inmigración y Fronteras, the national immigration and borders centre) and Frontex maps of routes into Spain, which he said showed a rise in secondary movements towards the country from elsewhere in Europe. The working group is now weighing whether to call Frontex representatives to give evidence.
At the same session, David Querol of the Spanish Bar Council’s foreigners subcommittee warned that the process could “block the courts” with thousands of appeals if provisional authorisations are later refused.
The Popular Party (PP) chairs the mixed committee that will scrutinise the regularisation; Edurne Uriarte presides, with the PP and Vox holding a weighted majority.
Opposition parties say the decree rewards illegality, overwhelms public services and was designed as electoral engineering.
Two PP-run regions, Aragón and the Valencian Community, have asked the Supreme Court to consider whether the measure collides with the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum. The court declined in July to refer the question to the European Court of Justice and has refused to suspend the process, leaving the case to run in the Spanish courts.
The government has argued that ageing and a low birth rate make immigration economically necessary and that Spain cannot afford to “look the other way”, pointing to more than 3.1 million foreign contributors to Social Security, or 14.1 per cent of the total.
Official data show, though, that non-EU foreigners have an employment rate close to 10 points below that of Spaniards and an unemployment rate almost eight points higher, while foreign workers are over-represented in temporary and lower-paid jobs. Foreign nationals are 14.9 per cent of residents but close to a third of the prison population.
Spain’s left-wing government approved Tuesday a plan to regularise around 500,000 undocumented migrants by decree. https://t.co/1vtQAG5u8i
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) January 27, 2026
