As soon as I arrived, I learnt that a demonstration against the government had just been called, and I made arrangements to go and film it. By then, it made no difference that the Interior Ministry was insisting that almost all the migrants had returned to Morocco. To the chants of “Ceuta is not for sale”, “Pedro Sánchez, resign!” and “Ceuta, united, will never be defeated!”, those present said they felt abandoned, humiliated and betrayed.
“This cannot be, Spain cannot have such a useless intelligence service that it has no idea what is going on in Ceuta,” one woman told me, saying she had not managed to sleep for two nights and had shut herself away at home with her granddaughters.
“This is a military city. The 3,000 soldiers we have should have been deployed to defend it,” said another participant as she waved a Spanish flag.
“No one came out to say absolutely anything. At least to say what we are going to do. A plan. Nothing,” said a third demonstrator, before launching into fierce criticisms of the government’s migration policies and its management of the crisis.
Alongside the indignation, we sensed an unmistakable feeling of fear, heightened by the fact that the migrants who arrived are overwhelmingly men. An undetermined number remain in Ceuta, including at least 1,000 minors, according to the Government Delegation, roaming beaches, streets, parks and wasteland.
“There is no money in Morocco. That is why we came to Spain. But here we have been treated very badly,” one of them told me, as he wandered aimlessly down a main street at midday, in 33°C heat.
“My father, my whole family are poor. Now we are here and we try to get by. We sleep on the street. We are here, life is very hard, but…,” another told me, as he wandered towards the city’s port.
“Are you going to try to stay here or will you have to go back?” I asked him. “For now, here. I don’t know how long I can hold out here,” he replied.
The omnipresence of migrants fosters a feeling of vulnerability and defencelessness even among residents who describe themselves as moderate and empathetic.
“You feel afraid because everything gets out of control, you feel that the security forces cannot keep up,” a man told me as he played with his dog. “For the safety of the people who live over there in Morocco and of those of us who live here, since a border has to be in place, it needs to be a solid one.”
This sense of anguish is barely eased by the visible deployment of the state security forces. On the very day I arrived, my camera captured one of their operations involving a group of migrants by one of the city’s most central beaches. Shortly afterwards, at the border, I watched as other migrants were taken off buses and escorted back to the very spot where they had entered days before.
The crisis is also a human tragedy. Spanish authorities say at least 75 people drowned while trying to swim across the stretch of sea by the border, now protected by a floating barrier, and there are fears there may have been more victims.
The migrants who remain have no means of subsistence. Since the start of the crisis, the NGO Luna Blanca says it has assisted at least 4,000 people. On the afternoon I was filming, 2,000 food portions were handed out in barely two hours. I asked its coordinator, Halima Ahmed Iacobi, whether she feared that actions such as this might be criticised as triggering a pull factor.
“We are human first and foremost. We cannot allow people to die of hunger. So, where does humanity come in? What do we care about the pull factor?” she replied, as she handed out milk, bread, sponge cakes and biscuits to migrants.
“Do you know what the pull factor is? The pull factor is the rumours that spread on social media saying that when a migrant arrives in Spain a red carpet is rolled out, they are given 1,500 or 1,800 euros in benefits, every social benefit imaginable is opened up to them, with soup kitchens for their children. The only thing they still need to tell them is that they are given a car and a holiday flat as well. That is the pull factor.”
I stayed in Ceuta for less than 30 hours, leaving four days after the start of the crisis.
Between indignation, fear, anguish, incomprehension, mistrust, bewilderment and compassion, the Autonomous City appears to face an uncertain struggle to regain normality.