The Ceuta Border Crisis: A Strategic Blind Spot
The American right is obsessed with a migrant crisis in a Spanish city—and many liberals aren’t paying attention.
Sabina Cherner is a communications intern at the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move. She is a student at Tufts University, where she is studying international relations and economics.
Max Mottola is a communications intern at the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move. He is a student at the University of Chicago, where he is studying political science and economics.
“It’s terrible. Remember that picture,” President Donald Trump told Fox News on Friday. “That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in.”
He was talking about Ceuta. Photographs and videos of tens of thousands of migrants swimming toward the Spanish city from Morocco have been circulating on social media for nearly a week. Those images will have real political impact—on both sides of the Atlantic.
What happened in Ceuta?
Ceuta is in Spain, but not in Europe: it’s an exclave located on the North African coast next to Morocco. The city has been under Spanish control since the sixteenth century.
For two days last week, the world watched a genuine humanitarian crisis unfold in real time, as somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 people, most of them young Moroccan men, surged across the border into Ceuta, nearly doubling the city’s population. Dozens died in the attempt, most by drowning: Spanish authorities placed the death toll at 72 as of Sunday.
The Spanish government responded by swiftly deploying armed troops to join local police in deporting those who crossed illegally, and installed an inflatable barrier restricting access to the peninsula on which Ceuta sits. By Saturday, 48,300 had been sent back.
The spark for this exodus is disputed. There was a rumor—amplified across WhatsApp and social media—that Spain’s border was effectively open. This was based on a recent Spanish Supreme Court ruling that hopeful migrants interpreted as preventing their forced return if they crossed the border by sea. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez laid the blame on traffickers who deliberately spread misleading information about that ruling.
Yet the scale of the crisis has led many observers to suspect orchestration rather than spontaneity. Some migrants reported being waved forward by Moroccan border guards, fueling speculation that the episode echoes a 2021 incident, when Morocco loosened its border controls to pressure Spain over aid money and the disputed Western Sahara territory. (Some expanded this theory to include—without evidence—Israel: Human Rights Watch’s Ken Roth, for example, suggested a conspiracy between Rabat and Jerusalem to stop Israel-critical Spain from closing the Atlantic to Israeli shipping.)
Nevertheless, other governments have weaponized their borders before. Belarus shepherded Afghan and Middle Eastern migrants into the European Union via Poland in 2021. In the United States, Republican governors Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Doug Ducey sent thousands of migrants in planes and buses to Martha’s Vineyard and northern sanctuary cities, a calculated gesture of contempt for the Biden administration’s border policy.
What the right is saying
Despite Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s relatively lenient border policy, illegal immigration has stayed low throughout his tenure. The prevailing online response, both domestic and global, however, had very little to do with the facts.
Still, the images from Spain were real and visceral, and they will carry serious political currency in Europe and America. The scenes of a human cascade into Ceuta might have been lifted from a piece of nativist propaganda bearing the caption: “This is what happens when the left takes over.”
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Within hours, Spain’s far-right Vox leader Santiago Abascal was in Ceuta calling the crossing an “invasion” and an “act of war” by Morocco, while simultaneously blaming Sánchez’s immigration policy for enabling it. Leaders of far-right movements across Europe insisted that the “invasion” could not be reversed, and that it would eventually reach their countries with destructive consequences.
Alice Weidel of Germany’s AfD posted, “Sánchez will try to distribute them across the EU with the majority ending up in our country. This must not be allowed to happen. Germany must insist on deportation and advocate for the suspension of the Schengen Area!” Jordan Bardella of France’s National Rally accused Spain’s prime minister of “opening the doors of all of Europe,” vowing to “hold Pedro Sánchez and all the ideologues of population replacement accountable.”
For much of the far-right, the Ceuta incident provided the perfect pretext to declare that the “great replacement theory” they had long warned of was finally underway. Mainstream politicians, eager to avoid a repeat of the 2015 European migrant crisis which helped catapult the far-right to mainstream success, chimed in too. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a social democrat, appealed for other EU states to consider suspending Spain’s access to the Schengen free-movement zone. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni heeded the call, reimposing border checks with Spain for a month.
The American response arrived with none of the pretense of sincere concern for European border security.
Other members of the Trump administration quickly echoed the president’s admonition that Ceuta would be a precursor to a supposed future Democratic immigration meltdown.
Stephen Miller, the White House’s chief immigration strategist, added his own apocalyptic warning: “Democrats will see your home trampled and stolen by invaders and they will rejoice.”
The US State Department’s official X account went further, explicitly blaming Spain’s “deliberate efforts to enable and facilitate mass illegal migration into Europe,” and concluding with an assurance that Washington is “considering actions to defend Americans at home and abroad from this threat.”
Elon Musk joined the chorus, reposting a flurry of warnings from affiliated far-right accounts.
A strategic blind spot
Against the barely concealed enthusiasm with which the far-right covered Ceuta, much of the prominent anti-Trump media has remained conspicuously silent. While legacy media outlets covered the story, platforms in the anti-Trump “resistance” media ecosystem like The Contrarian, The Bulwark and Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters From an American have not as of this writing. Major elected Democrats have been quiet too.
That’s a strategic blindspot: Ceuta was undoubtedly the biggest story on the American right last week. The images from Ceuta may not have registered in social media feeds strewn with stories of ICE abuse and daily corruption from the Oval Office. But they are being seen by millions of Americans susceptible to the far-right’s influence. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that footage from Ceuta will feature in campaign ads this fall or in 2028. We can dispute manipulated narratives, but in order to push back against authoritarian populism, we need to be aware of what the narrative is to begin with.
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