An internal report from Catalonia’s regional police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, has shown that foreign nationals were responsible for the majority of arrests for several serious offences in the Spanish region in 2025, despite making up less than a fifth of the population.
The document found that 84.3 per cent of those arrested for theft, 73 per cent of those arrested for robbery with violence and 60.3 per cent of those arrested for sexual assault were foreigners.
Foreign residents account for around 18.7 per cent of Catalonia’s population, according to figures from Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE).
The data were released following a parliamentary question tabled by the right-wing party Vox and were not part of any routine public statistical release by the Generalitat, the regional government of Catalonia.
AFRICAN NATIONALS LEAD ARRESTS
For theft alone, the Mossos recorded 6,806 arrests of foreigners against 1,269 of Spaniards, according to the report. Within the foreign category, those from Africa formed by far the largest group, accounting for 3,145 arrests for theft, almost half the overall total.
The pattern was repeated in robbery with violence and intimidation, with 5,335 foreign nationals arrested compared with 1,968 Spaniards. Of those, 3,899 arrests involved suspects from African countries, against 778 from the Americas.
In sexual assault cases, the document recorded 1,008 arrests of foreigners against 664 of Spaniards. For homicides, including attempted homicides, foreigners accounted for 55 per cent of detentions, the report indicated.
The Mossos d’Esquadra is one of Spain’s three fully autonomous regional police forces, alongside the Basque Ertzaintza and Navarre’s Policía Foral. It has primary responsibility for general policing in Catalonia, with the national Guardia Civil and Policía Nacional retaining only specific competences such as anti-terror operations and border control.
REPORTS FROM OTHER REGIONS
The disclosure has reignited debate in Spain over the publication of crime data broken down by national origin and over the link between immigration and criminality.
The Catalan regional executive announced in November 2025 that it would move towards greater transparency on crime and nationality. Though, as of May 2026, no full public report with the level of detail contained in the leaked internal document had been issued.
Two other Spanish regions have already begun to release similar figures. In the Basque Country, in northern Spain, the regional Ertzaintza police published its first official report on the nationality of those arrested in November 2025.
It found that, between January and September 2025, 64.2 per cent of those detained were foreigners. The proportion rose to 68 per cent for sexual assaults and 77 per cent for robbery with violence.
In the autonomous community of Navarre, also in northern Spain, parliamentary pressure forced the regional Policía Foral to disclose figures showing foreign nationals had been responsible for 63 per cent of sexual offences and 73 per cent of homicides.
POLITICAL DEBATE INTENSIFIES
Vox and other opposition groups have argued that such data should be published systematically and that aggregated national statistics can conceal patterns relevant to public policy and border security.
Left-wing parties and immigrants’ rights organisations have long opposed publishing crime statistics broken down by nationality, arguing that such breakdowns can stigmatise entire immigrant communities and obscure the underlying socio-economic drivers of offending.
The release of the Catalan figures comes amid wider European tensions over immigration, with the European Union in the process of phasing in its Pact on Migration and Asylum, agreed in 2024. The framework, covering relocation, border procedures and returns, has remained a source of friction between national capitals and Brussels.
Analysts have noted that police statistics measure arrests rather than convictions and do not, on their own, establish causal relationships. Factors such as age, gender, employment status and socio-economic conditions are typically more strongly correlated with offending rates than nationality alone.