Spanish authorities said at least 72 migrants died after about 50,000 to 60,000 people swam, scrambled and later charged into the tiny Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa this week, while Spanish civil guard ships kept searching for bodies in the waters near the urban beach that had been breached days earlier. The border spectacle left death in its wake. The people at the bottom paid first.
Most of the 60,000 migrants had walked back to Morocco by Sunday, but some remained in the hills around the city as Ceuta shops reopened and the enclave’s usual mix of residents and tourists filled its open-air terraces, restaurants and cafes. The city kept moving. The aftermath didn’t.
Who Paid for the Border
Spanish authorities said some of the dead drowned and others were killed in a stampede while trying to cross a breakwater barrier. The sudden rush of people reignited debate over immigration in Europe and beyond, but the bodies in the water and the crushed at the barrier tell the sharper story. The machinery of border control and the panic it produces landed on migrants first, while officials and commentators got to argue over the meaning later.
Mohamad Abdelkader Driss, 44, a waiter at a fried fish restaurant in town, said, “It’s not the young men’s fault. If you open the border, of course everyone comes in, but the young men aren’t to blame. The authorities are responsible.” He also said, “It could have been much worse.” His words cut through the usual official fog. He pointed the blame upward, where the decisions sit.
Some migrants who returned to Morocco said the border was effectively open and that authorities did little as they watched thousands of people cross. That account matters because it shows the state not as a wall, but as a gate that can be left hanging open when power wants to send a message or loses control of its own apparatus. Either way, ordinary people absorb the consequences.
The Politics of Panic
Over the weekend, far-right, anti-immigrant Spanish politicians and well-known right-wing influencers came to the city, prompting counterprotests that included members of Ceuta’s large Muslim population, many of whom are of Moroccan descent. Alvise Pérez, a far-right Spanish politician and member of the European Parliament, called on Saturday evening for migrants to be expelled as he faced an angry crowd of rival protesters. Pérez eventually sheltered in a bar as residents banged on the windows, until police escorted him away.
Noor Ahmed, a 20-year-old Ceuta resident and student, said the protest and the presence of figures like Pérez were opportunistic. “They just want to take advantage of the humanitarian crisis Ceuta is currently experiencing,” Ahmed said. That’s the familiar script: crisis on the ground, careerism at the top.
Santiago Abascal, the leader of the far-right Vox party, visited Ceuta on Sunday and called the migrant surge “an invasion.” He said, “The frontiers of Ceuta and Melilla are the walls of our home and homeland, and they are not being protected by a corrupt and traitorous government.” His language turned human movement into siege theater, with migrants cast as the threat and the state cast as too weak, too dirty, or too traitorous to defend the border fortress properly.
Who Gets to Speak for Order
Eva Barrientos, a Ceuta resident who works at a logistics company, said she came to the protest on Saturday evening to hear what Pérez and other right-wing figures had to say. She said, “In Ceuta, we have always lived together. We have four cultures living very well, without any problems. But the only thing we are realizing now is that there is an enemy within.” She accused some foreign-born residents of having more loyalty to Morocco than to Spain.
That’s how hierarchy feeds itself: by turning neighbors into suspects and crisis into a hunt for internal enemies. The language changes, but the function stays the same. People at the bottom are told to fear each other while politicians and influencers harvest the anger.
Pope Leo XIV said on Sunday that he was “following with concern the alarming situation in Ceuta, asking God … that solutions of peace, stability and justice may be found.” Migration has been one of Pope Leo’s priorities, which he underlined during a recent visit to the Canary Islands in Spain, one of Europe’s main migrant entry ports. The plea for “solutions” arrived after the deaths, the stampede, the searches, and the political theater. The border had already done what borders do.