A member of the Spanish armed services watches over migrants crossing the border between Spain and Morocco on July 31, 2026, in Ceuta, Spain.
Photo: Adri Salido/Getty Images
Over 50,000 people
last week
risked their lives
to cross the border between Morocco and Ceuta, the tiny Spanish enclave in north Africa, in the hope of making it to mainland Europe.
The vast majority have already been returned to Morocco; fewer than 2,000 refugees remain on Ceuta and are, according to on-the-ground reports, in urgent need of food and shelter. Over 80 people reportedly died during the crossings, most from drowning.
The crisis for those seeking to enter Europe through Ceuta last week, including those who have been sent back, has already been framed according to a putrid, far-right political fulcrum. As a wide array of responses to the situation on Ceuta make clear, a commitment to harsh border regimes is not the sole preserve of the far right.
Once
again
, liberals and centrists who claim to decry the right’s anti-immigrant stances are themselves
treating immigrants as a threat
to be secured against.
For the international far right, images of thousands of desperate young African men entering European Union territory — little matter that Ceuta is, in fact, not on mainland Europe — has been fodder for predictable racist fearmongering and calls for extremist border rule. Far-right leaders blamed the crossings of the left-wing Spanish government’s extremely reasonable
plans
to regularize over 1 million undocumented immigrants who have already been living and working in Spain for at least five months.
“It’s terrible. Remember that picture. That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in,” President Donald Trump
told
Fox News, in a groundless attempt to use the suffering on Ceuta to his advantage. A spokesperson for the White House
decried
Spain’s new immigration regularization proposal as “far-left, globalist policies.”
From th
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