At least 72,000 people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in the space of days, overwhelming the city and its reception facilities and leaving the Interior Ministry to say almost all had returned to Morocco. The numbers are staggering. So is the machinery behind them. A floating barrier, border police, soldiers, buses, detention-by-another-name, and a city left to sort through the wreckage while officials talk about control as if control had anything to do with human desperation.
The Border as State Theatre
Spanish authorities said at least 75 people drowned while trying to swim across the stretch of sea by the border. That figure sits at the centre of the story, even if the official language tries to push it to the margins. The border here is not a line on a map. It is a killing zone, protected by a floating barrier and managed by the same institutions that call the result order.
The reporter said that when he arrived two days after the crossings, a demonstration against the government was already under way. Protesters chanted "Ceuta is not for sale", "Pedro Sánchez, resign!" and "Ceuta, united, will never be defeated!" One woman said, "This cannot be, Spain cannot have such a useless intelligence service that it has no idea what is going on in Ceuta," adding that she had not slept for two nights and had shut herself away at home with her granddaughters. Another participant said, "This is a military city. The 3,000 soldiers we have should have been deployed to defend it." A third demonstrator said, "No one came out to say absolutely anything. At least to say what we are going to do. A plan. Nothing," before criticising the government’s migration policies and crisis management.
That’s the state in miniature: intelligence services, soldiers, and officials who arrive after the fact, if they arrive at all. The people living inside the enclave are left with fear, confusion and a lot of speeches about security that don’t seem to secure much.
People on the Move, People Left on the Street
The reporter said the migrants who arrived were overwhelmingly men, and that migrants were roaming beaches, streets, parks and wasteland. One migrant said, "There is no money in Morocco. That is why we came to Spain. But here we have been treated very badly." Another said, "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…" Asked whether he would stay or go back, he replied, "For now, here. I don’t know how long I can hold out here."
Those are the words that matter most, because they come from the bottom of the border regime, not from the people who design it. The enclave’s crisis was not just a matter of numbers and maps. It was a mass of people pushed into streets, beaches and parks, then watched by the same state that claims to manage the situation humanely.
The visible deployment of state security forces did little to ease the sense of anguish. The reporter said he captured one operation involving a group of migrants by one of the city’s most central beaches and later saw other migrants taken off buses at the border and escorted back to the place where they had entered days earlier. The choreography is familiar. Move people. Contain people. Return people. Call it governance.
Humanitarian Relief Inside the Cage
The NGO Luna Blanca said it had assisted at least 4,000 people since the start of the crisis. On the afternoon the reporter was filming, 2,000 food portions were handed out in barely two hours. Its coordinator, Halima Ahmed Iacobi, said, "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 also said, "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."
The relief effort is real. So is the gap it fills. Luna Blanca handed out food while the border regime kept doing what it does: sorting, blocking, escorting, and leaving people to sleep on the street. The city remained tense, confused and fearful. The reporter said he stayed in Ceuta for less than 30 hours and left four days after the start of the crisis. By then, he wrote, between indignation, fear, anguish, incomprehension, mistrust, bewilderment and compassion, the Autonomous City appeared to face an uncertain struggle to regain normality.
Normality, in this case, means a fortified enclave, drowned bodies, exhausted residents, and a humanitarian group trying to hand out 2,000 meals in two hours because the state’s answer to mass human movement is always the same: barriers, force, and a lot of talk after the damage is done.