Those were the words of Rachid Sbihi, head of the association representing Spain’s Civil Guard officers policing the border in Ceuta, when he spoke to the Associated Press on Thursday evening. “The situation is absolute chaos.” By that point, thousands of migrants had breached the border fence in a single day. At least nine people had died in the attempt. Spain had announced it was deploying the military. Prime Minister Sánchez was on his way to the enclave this morning. Belongings left behind by those who made it floated in the sea.
Ten days ago, this was a story about people swimming. Hundreds of them, arriving in ones and twos and groups through the water between Morocco and the Spanish coast, hauled out by Red Cross boats and Civil Guard launches, walking dripping through Ceuta’s streets with swimming fins still on their feet. The enclave’s government leader Juan Jesús Vivas said the reception centres were collapsing. He was describing a situation that was already, by any reasonable measure, a serious humanitarian and administrative challenge. Then it became something else.
Thousands of people breached the border fence on Thursday. The Civil Guard officer Sbihi used the word chaos because there was no other word available to him. Nine deaths in a single day, in a territory of 84,000 people that sits on the northern tip of Africa and functions, by virtue of being a Spanish and therefore EU enclave, as one of the most consequential fourteen-kilometre strips of water on earth. Ceuta’s regional government called for a national emergency declaration on grounds of national security. Madrid refused — the legal threshold for a national emergency, the government determined, is not met by a migration crisis, whatever the scale. The Armed Forces were deployed anyway, to assist the Civil Guard in maintaining order in the city. The distinction between declaring an emergency and deploying the army is a fine one, and it will not be lost on either the European Commission or the European Parliament, which spent the spring constructing what it described as the most comprehensive migration management framework in EU history.
Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced she was threatening to suspend the Schengen open-border agreement with Spain, citing the need to “defend our borders and ensure the safety of our citizens.” Italy does not share a border with Spain. The geography is irrelevant to the politics. Meloni has been building her European profile, and her domestic political base, around exactly this kind of intervention: arriving loudly at someone else’s crisis, positioning herself as the voice of border realism, and leaving the actual management of the crisis to the country whose fence has been breached. The threat to suspend Schengen is legally near-meaningless in this context. As a signal of where the political energy in European migration politics now sits, it is precise.
What happened at Ceuta this week did not come without warning. The Interior Ministry’s own data showed that irregular arrivals in the enclave had risen by 149 percent in the first half of this year compared to 2025. Land crossings were up 215 percent over the same period. These numbers were public. The trajectory they described was visible. What escalated the crisis from a trend into an emergency was a combination of factors that have been present and observable for weeks: the Spanish Supreme Court ruling earlier this month barring immediate pushbacks of migrants arriving by sea, the summer conditions that make the crossing viable, the social media amplification of successful arrivals on TikTok, and — the factor that every analyst raises and no Spanish official will state plainly — the question of what Morocco is doing, or not doing, on its side of the fence.
The pattern established in May 2021 is the unavoidable reference point. Then, as now, Morocco appeared to loosen border controls at a moment of bilateral tension with Spain — the trigger then was Madrid’s decision to allow Polisario Front leader Brahim Ghali to receive hospital treatment in Spain. Over three days, more than 8,000 people entered Ceuta. Spain deployed troops. Sánchez flew to the enclave. Within weeks, the diplomatic row had been quietly resolved through concessions on the Western Sahara question, Moroccan police returned to the border, and the crisis was declared over. The underlying dynamic — that Morocco’s cooperation on migration is a variable adjusted to bilateral relations rather than a fixed commitment — was fully established by that episode and has not changed since.
Spain’s Interior Ministry this week said Morocco was “closely cooperating” with Spain and that Moroccan police were stopping “numerous people” trying to cross. Both governments agreed to work together “for the return, as soon as possible, of all the people who entered Ceuta illegally.” The language is the language of partnership. The timeline of this week’s events suggests that cooperation, whatever form it takes today, was not in place when thousands of people were moving toward and through the fence on Thursday night. Either Moroccan border controls failed simultaneously across a wide stretch of territory, or they were not being applied. Spain’s officials have not said which, because saying which would require naming a thing that the bilateral relationship cannot survive being named.
The EU’s position is structurally uncomfortable. The Commission’s response has, so far, been to express solidarity with Spain and note that Frontex resources are available. The Pact on Migration and Asylum entered implementation in June. The Returns Regulation, passed by the European Parliament six weeks ago, extended detention powers and created the framework for third-country return hubs. These are the instruments of the migration management architecture that Brussels has spent three years constructing. None of them do anything about what happened at Ceuta’s fence on Thursday evening, because none of them address the question of what Morocco will or will not do at its border on any given night.
Europe’s southern border is not, in operational terms, where European law says it is. It is wherever Morocco decides it is. That is a statement about the real distribution of power in European migration management that EU institutions are structurally unable to make directly, because making it directly would require acknowledging that the bloc’s external border control — the foundational premise of Schengen — depends on the cooperation of a third country that has demonstrated, more than once, that it will adjust that cooperation to serve its own interests. Morocco is not wrong to do this. It is a sovereign state pursuing its foreign policy through the means available to it. The problem is not Moroccan behaviour. The problem is European dependence on that behaviour, which three decades of migration policy have deepened rather than reduced.
Macron visited Morocco in 2024 and offered explicit support for Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in return for a “strategic migration partnership.” Spain has been making equivalent calculations for years. The result of those calculations is the arrangement that broke down on Thursday: a de facto outsourcing of EU external border control to Rabat, without any formal treaty obligation, without any enforcement mechanism, and without any alternative plan for when the outsourcing arrangement lapses. When it lapsed in 2021, it took a diplomatic concession to restore it. The concession being extracted this time has not yet been named, but the negotiation is already underway, in the phone calls and back-channels that run parallel to the press statements about “close cooperation.”
Sánchez arrives in Ceuta this morning facing a crisis that is, simultaneously, an acute emergency and a chronic condition. The acute emergency — thousands of people inside a Spanish enclave, nine dead, an overwhelmed reception system, military deployed in a city — will be managed. Morocco will tighten its border controls, the numbers will fall, and the images will gradually leave the front pages. The chronic condition — the structural dependence on Rabat, the legal constraints on immediate returns at sea, the social and economic forces generating crossings that no fence and no regulation can fully stop — will not be resolved by a prime ministerial visit, a military deployment, or a new EU directive.
Europe has now passed, in the space of six weeks, both its most comprehensive migration management framework and its most visible demonstration that the framework’s core mechanism — partner country cooperation — cannot be taken for granted. The Returns Regulation allows member states to transfer people to third-country return hubs. It does not compel third countries to accept them. The Asylum Pact redistributes responsibility for processing arrivals among EU member states. It does not reduce the number of arrivals. The instruments are real. The gap between the instruments and the problem they are meant to address is also real, and it is visible this morning in Ceuta, where belongings left by those who made it across still float in the water.
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