About 60,000 migrants have crossed from Morocco into Spain’s tiny Ceuta territory in the past 24 hours, Ceuta’s president said Friday, a figure that is equivalent to 70 per cent of the population of the self-governing city in North Africa.
But roughly half of them have already made their way back voluntarily, the Spanish government said.
The sudden arrival of so many migrants triggered chaos and a humanitarian crisis. Spain deployed its armed forces and additional police to restore order in Ceuta while security forces clashed with migrants on the Moroccan side of the border. At least 41 migrants died attempting the crossing.
“The situation that Ceuta is going through is absolutely unsustainable,” Ceuta President Juan Jesús Vivas told journalists.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visited Ceuta on Friday and condemned the border breach, which he described as “a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity.”
Sánchez blamed human smugglers for the crisis, saying they “deceive so many young people, and ultimately lead many of them to their deaths — whether in the ocean or, as in this case, at Spain’s border in the autonomous city of Ceuta.”
Spain’s interior ministry, which initially refused to share estimates from the border, released its own figures shortly after Vivas’ spoke, estimating that some 50,000 people had crossed from Morocco since Thursday. It added that 25,000 had already returned to Morocco, with hundreds more going back by the hour.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the “images coming from Ceuta are unacceptable.”
“We cannot allow anyone to come to our Union without abiding by our rules,” she said Friday in an online statement. “Dangerous crossings must stop immediately. Smuggling networks must be dismantled. And returns must be swift, as our rules allow.”
Some of the 41 people who died had drowned, Sbihi said, but some were also killed in a stampede to cross the breakwater fence at Tarajal beach, an urban beach near a border checkpoint with Morocco. The waters near the border fence were littered with buoys, shoes and other belongings left behind.d Italy threatened to suspend Spain from the EU’s internal open-border scheme.
