- 2 months ago
Madrid’s decision to rush 200 elite police officers and troops to Ceuta has placed Spain’s northern African enclave at the center of a fast-moving border crisis.
The deployment reflects growing alarm in the capital over the scale, speed, and unpredictability of pressure along the frontier.
The deployment reflects growing alarm in the capital over the scale, speed, and unpredictability of pressure along the frontier.
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00:00Madrid just rushed 200 elite police and troops to Ceuta after the border completely collapsed.
00:0520,000 people stormed in. 19 drowned. Guards stopped counting and started pulling bodies
00:10from the water. What triggered absolute chaos at Europe's only land border with Africa? Let's find
00:14out. The morning the border stopped existing. Two doors, that is what Europe has on the ground,
00:20facing an entire continent. And on Thursday morning, one of them came off its hinges.
00:24The pressure had been building for over a week. Ceuta's regional president, Juan Jesses Vivas,
00:29had been sounding the alarm on Spanish radio before the collapse ever happened. And the
00:33number he gave was already extraordinary for a city that size. About 1,000 to 2,000 people in the
00:38last
00:38week. 1,500 to 2,000 people arriving in a city of 85,000 in a matter of days. Vivas
00:45wanted people
00:45listening in Madrid to feel the proportion of it. So he scaled the figure up to the size of the
00:50country
00:50he was speaking to. To give you an idea for the rest of Spain, it would be as if 1
00:54million people
00:54had arrived by sea. 1 million people. A million? That was the equivalent he reached for. And he
00:59was describing the situation before the real surge began. Then Thursday arrived, and from
01:03midday onward the flow did not just increase, it changed category entirely. The route was
01:08the Terregil breakwater, the concrete spur, the Espigone, that runs out into the water
01:12where Moroccan territory ends and Spanish territory begins. People entered the sea on the Moroccan
01:16side and simply went around it, swimming, wading, floating on inflatable rings and inner tubes
01:21and whatever else would hold a body up, and then walked out onto a Spanish beach. Others went
01:25overland, forcing sections of fence and gates or walking around the barriers entirely.
01:29A freelance journalist in Madrid, Simon Hunter, described the detail that made the footage
01:34so strange to watch. Many of the people arriving were not running inland at all. They were deliberately
01:38getting into the water. Quite a few of them, interestingly, then immediately sort of immersing
01:44themselves in the Mediterranean in rubber rings. There was a reason for that, and it was a legal
01:49one, a belief about what Spanish law could and could not do to a person found in the sea
01:53rather than on the sand.
01:54Because they believe that if they're found in the sea, they cannot possibly be returned
02:00to Morocco.
02:01We will come back to that belief in part three, because it is the single most important legal
02:05thread in this entire story. For now, hold on to the image. Thousands of people in the
02:10water, going around a breakwater, in a strip of sea a few hundred meters wide. The man who
02:14gave the crisis its defining phrase was Ratched Espihai, head of the association representing
02:19Guardia civil officers in Ceuta. Speaking to the Associated Press as the crossings were
02:23still underway, he said the situation was absolute chaos, that it was not possible to give precise
02:28numbers because there were thousands crossing, and that the border had totally collapsed.
02:33That collapse is visible in the numbers themselves, which did not so much get revised as detonate.
02:37Spanish state broadcaster TVE reported two to three thousand crossings. By evening, Spanish
02:43media were quoting security sources, with a figure roughly ten times that.
02:47And some of the Spanish media like El Mundo are saying, quoting sources, saying that there's
02:5320,000.
02:5420,000, and even that was not the ceiling, by Friday morning Spain's own Interior Ministry
02:58was reportedly estimating some 49,000 people had crossed into Ceuta in 24 hours, with Guardia
03:04civil-linked estimates around 40,000 for a shorter, more intense window. Nobody could verify
03:09any of it in real time, for a simple and grim reason. The officers who would normally have
03:13been counting and registering people had stopped doing that job entirely. They were pulling
03:17people out of the water instead.
03:19Because people were dying, local authorities recovered nine bodies in Ceuta on Thursday.
03:24By that evening with six more recovered near the breakwater, the toll associated with the
03:28surge had reached 15. By Friday morning it was reported as at least 18, and some Spanish
03:33outlets, after three more bodies were found overnight, put it at 19. The cause in most cases was
03:38drowning, asphyxia by immersion, though Espihai noted that some deaths involved people caught
03:43in a crush at the fence area, by Terragil Beach. The bodies were taken to Guardia civil facilities
03:47at the fishing port for autopsies, and all of this was added to a running total of roughly
03:5160 migrant deaths on this route in recent months. Nor did it stop when the sun went down.
03:56In the early hours, more than a hundred minors and hundreds of adults swam in during the night,
04:01and another body was recovered. The video that circulated shot by Associated Press photographer
04:05Antonio Semper by Reuters, by RTV, by Alpais and local outlets, showed something that resisted
04:11easy summary. The majority were young Moroccan men, yes, but there were also women families,
04:15fathers carrying small children on their shoulders, girls walking up from the surf still soaked.
04:20Some people stopped to kiss the ground, some shouted Viva España at the cameras.
04:24The beaches filled with discarded inner tubes and flippers and abandoned clothing, and Spanish
04:28agents, a handful of them, in a handful of positions, mostly stood and watched, because
04:33there was nothing else useful they could do. Inside the city, the arithmetic broke, just
04:39as fast as the border had. And 2% was the conservative reading, based on the early figures rather than
04:51the later ones. The CETI temporary migrant center was already strained. The centers for unaccompanied
04:56miners were reported at over 1,600% of capacity before the surge even began. People slept in parks
05:02and on streets. Local businesses shut their doors. So all of the facilities there are completely
05:08overwhelmed already. By Thursday night, the president of Ceuta was no longer asking Madrid
05:13for resources. He was asking for something considerably more serious than that. What Ceuta asked for,
05:19and what Madrid actually sent. Juan Jesús Vivas spent Thursday on the phone and on the radio,
05:24making the same case in every forum he could reach. Through the government delegation,
05:28through individual ministers, and in a direct telephone conversation with Prime Minister
05:32Pedro Sánchez himself. His framing never softened.
05:35We are in a situation of absolute humanitarian and social emergency
05:40that demands action consistent with this emergency status.
05:43That last phrase is the whole argument in miniature. He was not asking for the label because labels are
05:48comforting. He was asking for it because in Spanish law, the label unlocks a specific machine.
05:52A mando unico. A single unified command that puts one authority over every force operating in the
05:58territory. That is through a single command to guarantee an energetic, decisive, and immediate.
06:04Specifically, Ceuta requested the declaration of a national emergency, or the activation of a
06:09situation of interest for national security, under Article 23, and following of Spain's national
06:14security law, Ley 36, 2015. Alongside it came two further demands. Full deployment of the army across the
06:21city, the land border and the beaches, to guarantee what Vivas called the inviolability of the frontier,
06:26and the temporary closure of the Terragil crossing with Morocco, both to halt entries and to increase
06:30pressure on Rabat to contain departures from its own side. He pointed explicitly at the precedent of May
06:352021, when exactly those kinds of exceptional measures had been used. And this was not one-man
06:40freelancing. The full junta de portavoses of Ceuta's assembly, the cross-party body that includes the local
06:45PSOE, the PP, Vox, and localist parties, backed the demands unanimously in an extraordinary meeting.
06:51In a city that small, everyone was on the same page. It is an autonomous city to maintain a stance
06:56of institutional loyalty, sense of state, and responsibility. Loyalty first, then the request,
07:01and the request was refused the same day. The Interior Ministry, under Fernando Gran Marleska,
07:06gave a technical answer rather than a political one. Its position was that a declaration of emergency of
07:12national interest belongs to Spain's Civil Protection Framework, under Law 17-2015, and that this
07:17framework simply does not contemplate migratory flows as a qualifying risk. The risks the law
07:22expressly provides for are natural and technological ones. Floods, seismic and volcanic risk, adverse
07:28weather, forest fires, accidents involving hazardous substances, nuclear and radiological risk.
07:33Migration is not on the list. Therefore, the government said, the mechanism could not be
07:37activated in the terms Vivas had asked for. There is a genuine legal mismatch buried in that
07:42exchange, and it is worth naming. Ceuta's side argued it was primarily invoking the national
07:46security law pathway, the one that grants single command powers. Madrid kept answering by reference
07:51to the civil protection rules and their limits. The two sides were, in a real sense, citing different
07:56statutes at each other. What Madrid did send, it sent quickly. The military element was approximately 60
08:08troops, structured as three platoons of 20 soldiers each, coordinated by the operations command and
08:13tasked with reinforcing the Guardia Civil in the exercise of its powers, and whatever else was
08:17necessary to maintain security in the city. They began deploying in support roles, including at
08:22Terragil, alongside military diving teams and a support vessel. Then came the headline number,
08:35the one in the title of this video. A target contingent of roughly 200 officers from the
08:39Unidades de Intervención Policial, the UIP, Spain's specialized intervention and anti-riot units,
08:45and the Unidades de Provención Huiriquión, the UPR. Three UIP teams from Seville had already landed
08:50on Thursday. Further personnel from the Central UIP and the Malaga UIP were scheduled over the following
08:56days. Officers already stationed in Ceuta were ordered onto double shifts with extraordinary hours.
09:01A small extra team of six from the Extrangeria Immigration and Documentation Unit went too.
09:07The Guardia Civil Reinforcement ran in parallel.
09:10And they're talking about also boosting the Guardia Civil, the Civil Guard,
09:15adding extra platoons immediately and in the coming days from local areas like Andalusia.
09:24Thirty officers from various Andalusian units went to reinforce Ceuta's citizen security unit.
09:29Separately, the permanent border surveillance contingent of 60 agents from the Agro Pasión
09:33de Reserva Y Seguridad received platoon reinforcements, 20 already incorporated,
09:38with two further platoons totaling 40 expected shortly. A border-focused boost of around 60 in
09:43total. You could say as many as 90 extra Guardia Civil officers arrived with two groups of divers.
09:50Those divers were GESH specialists, eight personnel in two groups, and given how many people were in the
09:56water, their role was less about interdiction than recovery.
09:59There'll also be a naval ship deployed and a helicopter.
10:03The maritime package centered on the oceanic patrol vessel Duke de Ahumada,
10:07plus additional boat crews, drone operators, and helicopter support.
10:11And from outside Spain entirely, Brussels made an offer.
10:14And Brussels has offered help from the Frontex security force to help process anybody that
10:22may be eligible for asylum.
10:24On paper, that is a substantial package assembled inside a single day.
10:29Ceuta's political class called it clearly insufficient, and their reasoning had four parts.
10:33First scale, 60 soldiers in a support role, a target of 200 specialized police, many not yet
10:39physically on the ground, and 30 extra Guardia Civil is an incremental reinforcement.
10:43It is not a transformative one, not for a city of 85,000 absorbing thousands of uncontrolled entries
10:49in a matter of hours.
10:50Second and more importantly, legal authority.
10:53Without the exceptional declaration, the army was confined to supporting the Guardia Civil.
10:57Soldiers could not independently detain, identify, or execute returns under ordinary rules,
11:02and the return tool itself had recently been narrowed by the courts.
11:05Troops standing on a beach they have no power to act on do not seal a frontier.
11:09Third, the package contained no physical sealing of the border,
11:12and no closure of the Terrigal crossing, which meant it also contained no diplomatic
11:17leverage over Morocco.
11:18Fourth, none of it addressed reception capacity, funding, or the structural legal
11:22fixes Vaivas had been demanding.
11:24He wanted three things fixed at once, and the reception centers were only the first of them.
11:29Intensify collaboration with Morocco, also reinforce the state security forces and corps.
11:34And then the fourth item, the one that points directly at a courtroom in Madrid,
11:37rather than a beach in Africa.
11:39And also try by all means to modify the law so that this deficit, in some way,
11:44this loophole highlighted by the Supreme Court ruling, is corrected.
11:48Meanwhile, the domestic politics ignited immediately, and the government knew it.
11:53That's right, they will say, many on the Spanish right are saying that this proves them absolutely
11:58right.
11:59The specific grievance was a regularization program covering a very large number of people
12:04already inside Spain.
12:05About half a million migrants are going to be granted an amnesty.
12:11The deadline has expired, and the government is still processing those applications.
12:15The conservative opposition demanded the Prime Minister Act.
12:18Vox went considerably further in its language.
12:21And Sánchez, along with Gran Marleska, traveled to Ceuta on Friday the 31st to assess the situation on the ground.
12:27And the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, will be going to Ceuta tomorrow.
12:34Vivas, for his part, ended his interview with a warning that was less a prediction than a countdown.
12:39If the measures I mentioned earlier are not applied in a decisive, energetic, and forceful manner,
12:43in a month we will be back to May 2021.
12:46He meant May 2021, and to understand why that date is a threat rather than a memory,
12:51you have to understand who has their hand on the tap.
12:53The court ruling the open gate and a continent that noticed.
12:57Spain's official explanation for the surge was legal, not geopolitical.
13:01In early July 2026, the Supreme Court restricted summary returns of people intercepted at sea
13:06while trying to reach Ceuta or Malia.
13:08Madrid's position was that smuggling networks had instrumentalized that ruling,
13:12a rapid return tool removed, a window opened, and word of mouth doing the rest.
13:17To see why that matters, you need to know what the removed tool actually was.
13:21Spain has had a policy of what they call devoluciones en caliente,
13:26which kind of means like hot returns.
13:28Hot returns, you crossed the fence, you went straight back without processing.
13:31That was the deterrent that had held the line for years, and by July 2026, at sea at least,
13:36it was under active legal challenge, which explains precisely why thousands of people
13:40were floating in inner tubes rather than sprinting up a beach.
13:44Commentators outside Spain seized on the irony that it was a Spanish court,
13:47not a European one, that had opened the gap. And to that legal opening, add a physical one.
13:52The Mediterranean was unusually calm that week, and calm water turns a
13:56lethal swim into a survivable one.
13:58It's making it easier for people to swim around the border.
14:01But there is a third factor, and it is the one Madrid conspicuously did not say out loud.
14:05Atraf Maymany of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights described the situation as exceptional,
14:10and said the Terregil border had been opened under unusual circumstances that morning.
14:14Reporting noted Moroccan auxiliary forces stepping back from primary posts along the perimeter,
14:19letting dense crowds advance on foot.
14:21Guardia civil associations called the influx orchestrated or enabled, and analysts,
14:26including those cited in the Financial Times, argued a movement of that scale
14:29could not have happened without Moroccan authorities knowing in advance or permitting it.
14:34Then overnight into Friday, the tap closed. Moroccan forces on the Fnitik side deployed water
14:39cannon and riot gear and reinforced the crossing points. There were clashes and stampedes,
14:43vehicles, including a bus, were set on fire. Most further attempts were contained. Parallel
14:48pressure and clashes were reported at Malia. That pattern, relaxation, flood, re-engagement,
14:53is precisely why so many people in Spain immediately thought of 2021.
14:57It was 8,000 people trying to come across the border.
15:008,000 in roughly 48 hours in May 2021, including between 1,500 and 2,000 miners,
15:07mostly by swimming or walking around the Terregil and Benzu breakwaters. And the mechanism was identical.
15:12When the Moroccan border authorities basically kind of stepped back.
15:17The reason they stepped back is documented, and it is the key to the entire relationship.
15:22Because there was a spat going on between Spain and Morocco.
15:25That spat was this. In April 2021, Spain allowed Brahim Ghali, leader of the Polisario Front,
15:31the Algeria-backed Sahrawi movement that has fought Morocco over Western Sahara since the 1970s,
15:36to enter the country secretly under a false identity for COVID-19 treatment in Logroño.
15:40At Algeria's request, Morocco treated it as a serious affront.
15:43Weeks later, controls at Ceuta loosened. Spain's response was troops,
15:47army units with armored vehicles and helicopters on the border and beaches,
15:51plus roughly 200 extra police, reinforcing the 1,200 already guarding the frontier.
15:56Note that number. 200 in 2021, for 8,000 arrivals.
16:00200 again, in 2026, for a figure Spain's own ministry put at 49,000.
16:06What made 2021 resolvable was the return machinery.
16:09More than 6,600 arrivals sent back within days under the bilateral agreement with Morocco.
16:14The army deployed alongside those returns, as the crisis was brought under control.
16:18That is the lever 2026 no longer had in the same form.
16:22The diplomatic damage lasted nearly a year, and only ended in March 2022,
16:26when Sanchez wrote to King Mohamed VI calling Morocco's autonomy plan for Western Sahara,
16:31the most serious, realistic, incredible basis for a settlement,
16:35abandoning decades of neutrality, repairing relations with Rabat and damaging them with Algiers.
16:40All of which sits on a much older wound.
16:42Western Sahara was Spanish until 1975, when Morocco organized the Green March and Spain signed
16:47the Madrid Accords and withdrew, despite an international court of justice ruling that
16:51neither Morocco nor Mauritania held sovereignty rights extinguishing the Sahrawi right to self-determination.
16:56A war followed, ending in a UN-brokered ceasefire in 1991, with a referendum that has still never
17:01been held. Morocco controls roughly 80% of the territory. The UN still lists it as non-self-governing.
17:08Which is why analysts have a term for what Ceuta and Malia have become,
17:11instruments of weaponized migration, where control over the flow of people functions as diplomatic
17:16pressure. 2021, being the textbook case of a tactic researcher's note, is far more
17:21common internationally than most people assume. So what was the friction in 2026?
17:25The most frequently cited proximate trigger in independent analysis was a trip.
17:29Around 20 July, Sanchez traveled to Algeria with energy executives to expand gas supplies
17:34for Morocco's regional rival. The Ceuta surge came roughly 10 days later.
17:38The Spanish Foreign Ministry rejected any connection, and no public evidence confirms
17:42an order from the top of the Moroccan government to open the border.
17:45What exists is a pattern, a posture, activist testimony, and a timeline.
17:49Publicly, Madrid said the opposite, praising Moroccan cooperation as exemplary and pointing
17:55at trafficking networks and the court ruling. On the specific charge that Spain's own amnesty
17:59had drawn these people in, journalists on the ground were unconvinced.
18:02No evidence to suggest that there's any pull effect from what Pedro Sanchez has been saying.
18:08El Pai's reporters speaking to arrivals found the same. Many said they were not even aware of the
18:13policies being blamed for their presence. But by then, the footage had left Spain,
18:17and the fight over what it meant was happening in capitals with no connection to Ceuta at all.
18:22Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called the images shocking, said they showed once again that
18:27uncontrolled illegal immigration is a real threat to the security of Europe's borders,
18:31and declared Italy prepared to act through extraordinary measures,
18:34explicitly including suspending the Schengen agreement with Spain.
18:38Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said he was in favor of closing the Schengen area with Spain,
18:43tying Ceuta to Sanchia's regularization policy, and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini backed the same line.
18:49And we have had sources saying to the Reuters that Italy intends to look at suspending
18:56the Schengen, its application of Schengen, the Schengen zone.
19:00Italy and Spain share no land border, which is what made the threat so pointed. It treated a
19:05Spanish-Moroccan incident in North Africa as grounds to interrupt free movement with a fellow Schengen
19:09member. The Schengen borders code does allow temporary reintroduction of internal controls for
19:14serious threats to internal security or exceptional migratory pressure,
19:18so the mechanism exists. Spain called it demagoguery. Foreign Minister Jose Luis Albers accused
19:23Rome of politicizing migration, and said Spain expected European solidarity, and Madrid summoned
19:29the Italian ambassador. Germany joined within hours. AFD co-leader Alice Weidel posted the
19:34Terragil footage to her own channels, describing Ceuta as overrun, asserting the arrival's destination
19:39was presumably Germany, demanding borders be closed and rejections rigorously enforced,
19:44and warning that 2015 must not be repeated, using a Spanish enclave's worst day to
19:48demand hardened German border policy, while German outlets ran Ceuta and the Schengen threat as a
19:53live European story through the day. And the image that travelled furthest was not of the
19:57crossings at all, but of the response to them. Spain has mobilized its army because, you know,
20:02the town is under threat. While the continent argued about what the footage meant, the people in Ceuta
20:07were doing something considerably more mundane. The Spanish and the Moroccan authorities are talking
20:14to try to speed up the return of migrants who have entered Ceuta this week. As of the 31st of
20:21July,
20:21that was the state of play. Reinforcements arriving. Identification underway. Some people already
20:26walking back toward Morocco voluntarily. The prime minister and his interior minister on the ground. And
20:31the actual number who crossed, the figure the entire European argument rested on, anywhere from 3,000
20:36to 49,000 depending on who you ask, and still unverified. What is not in dispute, 19 people are
20:41recorded as having died in the water, and at the fence. And the two doors Europe has on the African
20:46mainland, are still exactly where they were on Wednesday, held by roughly the same number of
20:51officers, under a legal framework that Ceuta's own government says, has no category for what happened to it.
20:56Thank you for watching. If you enjoyed watching this video, click on one of the boxes playing on
21:00your screen to watch more similar content.