Last week, an estimated 72,000 migrants began crossing into Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the tip of Morocco. Within 24 hours, most had returned home. At least 88 people died after attempting the crossing, according to local officials. This isn’t the whole story of what happened over the last week, but the facts are worth remembering.

EU Ministers Downplay Threat, Media Intensifies Alarm

At an emergency meeting on Monday, EU interior ministers sought to draw a line under the Ceuta incident, insisting that the passport-free Schengen area had never been at risk from the arrival of migrants at this scale. Despite this, much of the media coverage has suggested that events in Ceuta represent a territorial threat to Europe, sparking calls for greater security across the region’s borders.

This pattern has become familiar since the 2015 refugee crisis. As Europe has created fewer opportunities for migrants to legally cross its borders, people have tried to cross illegally, resulting in dangerous bottlenecks, human tragedies, and a slew of spectacular images that the right has seized upon to justify draconian policies.

Political Capital and Media Amplification

For this morning’s briefing, I spoke to Daniel Trilling, a journalist who writes about refugees and migration, about the political actors trying to capitalize on Ceuta and why tragedies like this are bound to keep happening. On Thursday, a group of people roughly the size of Guildford’s population began crossing into Ceuta. Many swam around the border fence. Some drowned; others were halted. Dozens died. “There were so many people in the sea. Everyone was trying to grab on to you to save themselves, and you were trying to escape and move forward so they wouldn’t drag you down or drown you,” one told the Guardian.

Most of these people were young men searching for work and hoping to build a better life for themselves. There are no reports suggesting any of them reached mainland Europe. “It’s very difficult for people without the right documents to travel from Ceuta to mainland Europe, and Spain has lots of experience returning people who cross without permission,” Trilling says. “So the claim that this is some kind of invasion of Europe is entirely untrue.”

Although Spain was reporting on Friday that most of these migrants had returned to Morocco, videos of men clambering on rocks and walking through Ceuta’s streets had already gone viral on social media, where they were amplified by right-wing voices. “Ceuta has been turned into a third world city in only 48 hours,” Tommy Robinson posted on X. Elon Musk, no stranger to sticking his oar into the politics of foreign nations, posted: “all military age males means it is an invasion.”

“By the time the images started circulating, the so-called crisis was over. But the political damage was already done,” Trilling says.

Hoaxes, Misinformation, and Coordinated Efforts

A social media hoax, which hinged on a Spanish supreme court ruling that migrants arriving by sea could not be summarily deported, seems to have played a central role in encouraging the crossings. Instagram posts suggested Spain’s border with Morocco was opening up, TikTok videos showed people where to swim, and Facebook users began tracking coast guard patrols. It’s unclear who was behind these accounts, as several of them were deleted soon after the crossings. At a crisis meeting on Saturday, EU member states speculated that the events may have been coordinated.

As the hoax spread, Moroccan border surveillance dwindled to a minimum, allowing thousands of people to cross into Ceuta. Some analysts have suggested that Rabat, Morocco’s administrative capital, deliberately opened the border to protest Pedro Sánchez’s recent visit to Algeria (Morocco has a territorial dispute with the country). Others have pointed to Rabat’s increasingly toasty relationship with the Trump administration, which has clashed with Sánchez during the Iran war.

The central problem is that European border policies have given countries like Morocco a means of exerting pressure on European states, according to Trilling. The EU has increasingly outsourced (“externalised,” in the policy lingo) border policing to non-EU countries, which have the power to loosen their borders whenever they choose. We’ve seen versions of Ceuta happen before: in 2021, Morocco allowed 10,000 people to cross into the territory during a diplomatic row with Spain. Turkey tried something similar on Greece in 2020, and Poland has long accused Belarus of encouraging migrants to cross into the Schengen area.

The EU has taken an increasingly hardline stance on migration since 2015. This has paradoxically helped to create some of the problems that politicians say they’re trying to solve. The fortification of security means that people are forced into taking illegal and unsafe routes where there might have been safe, legal routes previously. When border security is breached, it results in a sudden influx of people, and the kind of alarming images that we’ve seen this week, which are then used to justify even further restrictions. “The performance of control very often leads to precisely the sense in which things are out of control,” says Trilling.