CEUTA, Spain (AP) — Hundreds of teenage migrants lined up outside a church in Ceuta in early October, hoping Spain’s visiting minister of youth would bring them some good news: passage to continental Europe or at least a spot in a shelter.

For two months, they had slept on cardboard sheets and ripped sofas in squalid tent camps, or on the streets of the Spanish city in North Africa that juts into the Mediterranean like a thumb. On clear days, southern Spain is visible on the horizon.