Pope slams world’s indifference to migrants while visiting onetime ‘dock of shame’ in Canary Islands

ARGUINEGUÍN, Spain (AP) — Pope Leo XIV traveled to a once-notorious epicenter of the European migration debate on Thursday, challenging countries to uphold migrants’ rights while shaming those leaders, including Christians, who turn them away with indifference.

Leo issued an impassioned plea to recognize the dignity of migrants from the port of Arguineguín, in the Canary Islands. In 2020, the port was dubbed “dock of shame” because of the squalid conditions migrants were forced to live in for months during a spike in arrivals.

“Human dignity has no passport and does not lose its value when crossing a border,” Leo said, with rescue ships docked behind him and a simple wooden cross made from a shipwrecked migrant boat nearby.

Leo is spending the final two days of his weeklong trip to Spain in the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago closer to Africa than the Iberian Peninsula and a key point of entry for migrants who make the perilous Atlantic crossing from West Africa.

He is fulfilling a wish of Pope Francis to visit the islands to commemorate the thousands of lives lost at sea.

With two migrants standing by him, Leo threw a bouquet of flowers into the sea. The gesture recalled one Francis made in 2013, at the start of his pontificate, when he visited another migration flashpoint in Lampedusa, Sicily and denounced the “globalization of indifference” that the world showed migrants.

A visit to the ‘dock of shame’

The Canary Islands have long been a stepping stone for migrants trying to reach Europe from West Africa and Morocco. Some experts consider the Atlantic route they take to get here more deadly than the more well-known central Mediterranean smuggling route from Libya and Tunisia to Italy.

Migrant arrivals in the Canary Islands peaked in 2024 at nearly 47,000. Following pressure and deals between the European Union, Spain and the governments of several West African nations, arrivals have fallen dramatically, with just over 3,000 people landing there in the first five months of 2026.

Upon his arrival, Leo went straight to the port in Arguineguín, where in 2020 arrivals reached such numbers that migrants were forced to sleep on the dock in makeshift camps in the open air.

Many spent weeks just a blanket and no showers. Potential asylum seekers had no proper access to legal advice and some people were held for weeks, much longer than the three days that the law allowed. The ombudsman later forced the government to shutter the makeshift camp and relocate the migrants in hotels that had been emptied by COVID-19.

A challenge to uphold dignity

At the port on Thursday, Leo sat under a shaded platform while a fierce midday sun baked down on the migrants and aid workers. He heard testimonies from rescue workers, humanitarian workers and the personal story of a Nigerian victim of human trafficking. Nearby a banner, recalling the port’s former nickname, rebaptized it “Dock of Hope.”

“Dear migrants, before saying anything else to you, I want to bow before your dignity,” Leo said to them, bowing his head slightly.

Addressing the Nigerian woman and other women who have been trafficked and forced into prostitution, Leo assured them: “If others have put a price on your body, know that God has never ceased to recognize your inestimable worth,” he said.

He urged countries of origin to create the security and economic conditions so people are not forced to flee, and for transit countries to protect migrants so they don’t fall prey to smugglers. And he appealed to the “conscience of Europe, which cannot claim to uphold human dignity while growing accustomed to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic becoming unmarked graves.”

In one of the most powerful speeches of his pontificate, dedicated entirely to migration, Leo listed the rights of migrants to flee or remain. But he didn’t mention the right of nations to control their borders or limit asylum requests as he has done in the past. And significantly, he insisted that if one is Christian, one cannot ignore the plight of migrants.

“May history not accuse us of turning the pain of those who suffer into a common sight along our shores,” he said. “Today, here by the sea, every individual that arrives asks us what remains of our humanity. Sooner or later, it will be known whether we protected life or whether we yielded to indifference.”

Among the migrants waiting for Leo was Mame Amandou Neang, a 56-year-old who arrived in the Arguineguín port from Senegal earlier this year.

“This is a great honor,” said Neang. “We hope that if we see him, all our problems will stay behind us, we will forget our problems, because we have many things to forget for the moment.”

The International Organization of Migration’s Missing Migrants Project has recorded some 6,600 deaths on the Atlantic route from West Africa since it began keeping record in 2014. But it admits their estimate is a vast undercount due to the lack of information on the route and the phenomenon of “invisible shipwrecks.”

Since 2020, Spanish migrants rights group Walking Borders estimates more than 25,000 dead or missing trying to reach the Canary Islands.

Leo follows in Francis’ footsteps in prioritizing migrants

Francis had made the plight of refugees a hallmark of his papacy, following the Gospel mandate to “welcome the stranger.”

Leo has followed suit, insisting especially on the dignity of migrants in his native United States amid the Trump administration’s crackdown and mass deportation program.

Next month, on July 4, the American pope will spend U.S. Independence Day on the island of Lampedusa, where Francis in 2013 first denounced the “globalization of indifference” the world shows migrants.

___

Winfield reported from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. Brito contributed from Barcelona, Spain.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.