Spain’s opposition parties are taking aim at Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s migration policies following the arrival of tens of thousands of unauthorized migrants in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta.
Over the past 24 hours, the migrants have forced their way into the heavily fortified autonomous city, which covers 18.5 square kilometers on the northern coast of Africa. With the Civil Guard forces that normally defend Ceuta overwhelmed, the Spanish army was mobilized to secure the border.
Speaking from Ceuta, where he flew to meet with officials overseeing the crisis on Friday, Sánchez characterized the situation as “an attack, a violation of the territorial integrity of Spain.”
Spain’s interior ministry on Friday said that approximately 50,000 people had entered Ceuta — whose normal population is around 80,000 — illegally. Of that total, approximately half have since voluntarily returned to Morocco. The Spanish presidency said migrants are departing from Ceuta at a rate of about 150 people per minute.
In Madrid, Sánchez’s critics said the crisis was one of his own making, triggered by the government’s scheme to grant legal status to more than 1 million unauthorized migrants.
Santiago Abascal, leader of the far-right Vox party, accused Sánchez of inciting “an invasion” with his migration policies, and said the crisis showed the prime minister “behaves like an enemy of Spain.”
“Every future rape or stabbing will have been imported by Pedro Sánchez, and his legacy is the collapse of our housing stock and our health care system,” he added. “Pedro Sánchez is the main culprit for what Spaniards are suffering and will suffer.”
“This national emergency can only be resolved by kicking him out before he tries to steal the next elections, and by prosecuting the traitor and mafioso Pedro Sánchez,” Abascal concluded.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the center-right People’s Party, similarly linked the crisis in Ceuta to “irresponsible decisions, like those taken with regard to our migration policy,” and said the videos of overrun border posts in Ceuta reflected “an image of decadence that Spain does not deserve.”
In a post on X, the People’s Party’s secretary general, Miguel Tellado, said “no one can be surprised that thousands of people want to enter a country that regularizes more than a million irregular immigrants overnight. Not only are we not stopping the avalanche, but we are sending the message that those who come soon will be able to become Spanish.”
Meanwhile, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the party’s high-profile president of the Madrid region, accused Sánchez of “allowing the invasion of Spain via Ceuta to try to cover up all of his trials,” referring to the tangle of corruption cases ensnaring the Socialist party.
Spain’s government hits back
A spokesperson for the foreign ministry retorted that the crisis in Ceuta had nothing to do with the government’s migration policies and pointed out that none of the people who have illegally entered Ceuta will be eligible to benefit from its legal status scheme.
“This process is based on very specific conditions, such as proof of residency in Spain before January 1, 2026, and having resided in Spain for five consecutive months at the time of application,” said the spokesperson. Moreover, the deadline for filing applications for the scheme, which was launched in April, was in June.
The Sánchez government has defended the legalization scheme as a necessary measure to ensure the country’s long-term economic growth amid declining birth rates, and the move was backed by unlikely allies like Spain’s conservative employers’ association and the Catholic Church.
But the scheme is contentious domestically, with some polls showing over half of Spaniards believe the country already hosts too many foreigners. It has also drawn criticism from figures like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who challenged Sánchez’s policies during a meeting of European leaders last month.
Meloni on Thursday called the images from Ceuta “striking” and said her country was prepared to push to have Spain shut out of the Schengen Area, the 29-country zone where internal border controls have largely been abolished.
After Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani expressed support for suspending Spain’s participation in Schengen, Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares summoned the Italian ambassador in Madrid to underscore his displeasure with Rome.
Spain’s foreign ministry pushed back against the criticism, with its spokesperson insisting Madrid “advocates for the efficient management of these processes, with respect for Spanish, European, and international law, and for human rights.”
“This migration crisis is not the first in Europe, and it will not be the last,” the spokesperson added.
Spain’s two exclaves in northern Africa, Ceuta and Melilla, are part of the Schengen Area, but are subject to special rules that require identity and document checks to be carried out when departing to destinations in continental Europe. In practice, those regulations impede unauthorized migrants from making it onto the ferries that cross the Strait of Gibraltar.
A judicial reaction?
Officially, Spanish authorities are attributing the current crisis to a legal decision issued by Spain’s Supreme Court earlier this month.
“These events are related to a court ruling,” Foreign Minister Albares said on Thursday.
On July 8, the top court ruled that Spain’s immediate-return procedure does not apply to migrants intercepted while attempting to swim to Ceuta and Melilla. According to the ruling, current legislation only permits unauthorized migrants to be returned without a formal deportation process if they are caught breaching a physical barrier.
Unauthorized migrants can still be sent back after crossing an unmarked maritime border, but are entitled to a formal deportation process. In its ruling, the top court said authorities should install some kind of “maritime containment measure” if they want to immediately return migrants caught in the water. On Friday, Sánchez said his government would move to create those conditions by deploying buoys off the autonomous cities’ shorelines.
The highly technical ruling barely made the news and no major shifts in migration patterns were detected in the weeks that followed.
It was only on Thursday that small groups of young migrants began to swim around the breakwater that separates one of Ceuta’s beaches from Moroccan territory. Over the course of a few hours, what appeared to be a small breach turned into a torrent, with thousands crossing into Spanish territory by sea, or by crawling across the rocky border.
The Moroccan side of the breakwater is usually patrolled by the country’s gendarmes, who normally collaborate with Spanish Civil Guards to impede migrants from crossing over. But Spanish authorities say their North African counterparts have vanished in recent days, leaving the area virtually unguarded.
Another Moroccan crisis
The absence of Moroccan guards on the border suggests the current crisis could be a power play by Rabat, and potentially a reaction to Sánchez’s recent rapprochement with Algeria, which supports self-determination in Western Sahara — a territory claimed by Morocco.
Morocco has a track record of relaxing controls on its borders with Ceuta and Melilla to exert political pressure on Madrid. The last major incident took place in 2021, after Spanish authorities permitted the president of the Western Sahara territory to receive medical treatment in Spain.
Rabat expressed its displeasure with the humanitarian gesture by relaxing controls on the border with Ceuta and allowing some 8,000 unauthorized migrants to stream into the city. According to some reports, Moroccan authorities not only facilitated the exodus, but incited it by sending buses to transport over 1,000 minors to the border.
In 2021, the breach did not result in any notable influx of unauthorized migrants to mainland Spain and the wider EU.
But the mass border breach five years ago sowed chaos in Ceuta and put pressure on Madrid to stop further incidents. In a bid to mend ties with Rabat in the aftermath of the crisis, the Sánchez government announced a complete reversal of its position on Western Sahara, which was governed by Spain until 1975, when Morocco took control of much of the territory.
For decades, Madrid advocated for a U.N.-sponsored referendum to settle the territory’s status — a position backed by the European Union. But in a 2022 letter to Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, Sánchez changed tack and called Rabat’s proposal to have Western Sahara recognized as an autonomous territory under Moroccan rule “the most serious, realistic and credible” course of action.
That move caused a major dispute between Spain and Algeria, which backs Western Sahara’s independence and is Morocco’s regional rival.
Calling Madrid’s position “morally and historically unacceptable,” Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune accused Spain of “breaking everything” and suspended the cooperation treaty governing trade relations between the two countries, leading to a collapse in Spanish exports.
He also threatened to void its fuel contracts with Madrid, which relies on Algeria for around a third of the natural gas it consumes, but ultimately honored those commitments.
After years of attempting to restore relations, earlier this month the tensions appeared to have been laid to rest. Flying directly from the World Cup final in New Jersey to Algiers, Sánchez joined Tebboune and unveiled an agreement forging closer political and commercial ties, and increasing the export of natural gas to Spain by 10 percent.
Rabat issued no official comment on the restoration of relations between Spain and Algeria, which had been severed since 2021.
And Morocco’s largely state-aligned press did not suggest the agreement had generated outrage within the country. Instead, publications like online newspaper Hespress depicted the rapprochement as a humiliation for Tebboune and stressed that the agreement signed in Algiers did not reverse Madrid’s position on Morocco’s control of Western Sahara.
A spokesperson for the Moroccan embassy in Madrid denied that Rabat played any role in the current crisis and attributed the massive wave of migrants to “criminal organizations.”
“Morocco does not favor or encourage irregular immigration,” the spokesperson told news agency Europa Press.
For the moment, the Spanish government is also downplaying tensions.
Sánchez on Friday described Morocco as “an ally” in the fight against “the mafias that traffic in human beings.”
A Spanish foreign ministry spokesperson added that “the relationship with Morocco is excellent, and coordination on migration and other issues remains very strong.”
“The governments of both countries are in constant contact at all levels to further strengthen this intense and productive coordination and thus address and resolve the situation in Ceuta,” the spokesperson concluded.