A Weeping Mother Says Migrants Will ‘Devour’ Her Daughter. What’s Really Happening in Ceuta?

A Spanish mother broke down on live television this week, saying she can no longer let her 16-year-old daughter leave the house alone in Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the North African coast that was overwhelmed by migrants crossing from Morocco.“I can’t take it anymore. Where are they even going? They have taken away the beach, they have taken away the park, in my neighborhood it is packed. If my daughter goes out at 16, she has to do it with her dad and me because they will devour her,” the mother said, her voice cracking.“I am not saying they are all bad or all good. I don’t want anything bad to happen to them, but please, they need to leave, because this is an invasion.”The clip, which circulated widely on social media, captured a mood that has gripped the tiny Spanish territory since late July, when tens of thousands of people crossed the border fence or swam around it within days.So what, exactly, has changed inside this stretch of Spanish territory to leave a mother convinced her teenage daughter is no longer safe walking to the beach alone?A City TransformedCeuta, a Spanish city of roughly 85,000 people wedged between Morocco and the Strait of Gibraltar, has spent weeks absorbing the fallout of one of the largest single migration surges the enclave has ever seen.Border guards near the Moroccan town of Fnideq stepped back from their posts for several days at the end of July, and people on both sides of the fence noticed the shift immediately. Some analysts think higher-ups ordered the pullback; Rabat says that was not the case.Still, it isn’t the first time. In 2021, a diplomatic spat with Madrid over Western Sahara led Moroccan officers to ease off patrols along that same stretch of border. Within days, thousands had swum or scrambled across.This summer, the migration swarm accelerated after a ruling from Spain’s Supreme Court was misread online as a promise of automatic legal status for migrants arriving by sea, drawing tens of thousands toward the fence within days. Spain’s interior minister put the figure at roughly 72,000 arrivals beginning July 31. Many swam several miles through the Mediterranean to avoid the fortified fence in a crossing that left almost 100 people dead within a week.About 1,100 unaccompanied minors who arrived before and during the wave are still stuck in the city, filling reception centers that were never built to hold so many. Spanish law bars the summary deportation of unaccompanied children, sending them instead into an asylum process that can last for months, sometimes years.Often, researchers say, families evaluate the risk of the swim or the fence before they send their children. Regardless of the motive, the result is the same: a city with more children than shelters can handle.“When a small territory is briefly overrun, and the government’s initial response appears reactive rather than preventive, trust in basic public safety erodes quickly,” a political strategist and the managing director of Nestpoint Associates, John Thomas, tells The New York Sun.He points to what he calls a documented rise in disorder since the surge, including “criminal investigations into alleged sexual assaults” among the several thousand migrants who never left the enclave.An adjunct senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Peter Doran, describes a similar dynamic.“Officials in Ceuta have processed criminal sexual assault charges involving arriving males against fellow female migrants,” Mr. Doran tells the Sun. “This highlights the worries that residents are sharing about the unrestricted influx into their enclave.”The senior director of the Counter Extremism Project, Hans-Jakob Schindler, agrees that the sudden breakdown of border controls “does create a sense of vulnerability among the residents of Ceuta.” But, he tells the Sun, the majority of migrants walked back across the frontier within days, leaving a population skewed toward minors “who require special care” — a burden the city’s systems were never built to absorb.Why The Crisis Keeps RepeatingInvestigators and analysts trace the July surge to confusion over a Spanish Supreme Court ruling on the treatment of migrants who arrive by sea rather than at a land border.“Legal loopholes, proximity to Morocco, and good weather are the main drivers,” Mr. Doran says, explaining that the court ruled that once ashore, a migrant who arrived by sea “cannot be forcibly denied the right to request asylum and remain in Spain until their claim is settled.” He calls the ruling “a recipe for mass migration.”Mr. Schindler attributes the surge to online misinformation that spread just before the crossings began. “That misinformation stated that the court had decided that Spanish authorities could not automatically push back migrants if they arrived by sea,” he says. But what got lost was that Ceuta sits outside the Schengen area, so arrival there confers no automatic right to travel onward into mainland Europe.Misinformation is only part of the story, according to a fellow for the Middle East and director of the Women’s Rights, Human Rights and Refugees Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, Kelsey Norman.The deeper driver, she tells the Sun, is economic. Morocco’s gross domestic product per capita stood at $4,153 in 2024, compared with $26,774 in Spain. “With that kind of inequality, people are going to migrate irregularly if there are no opportunities for regular migration,” Ms. Norman says.Some also see a diplomatic pattern layered on top of the economics.“Morocco has repeatedly used migration pressure as a diplomatic lever against Spain, while Spanish policy signals create windows of opportunity,” Mr. Thomas observes.Spain’s defense minister, Margarita Robles, accused Rabat of “blackmail” during an earlier flare-up, saying the kingdom endangered lives “for a purpose I certainly don’t understand.”Washington Weighs InThe crisis has jumped well past Spain’s borders. The State Department publicly backed Spain’s sovereignty claim over Ceuta while faulting Madrid’s border enforcement, with a spokesman calling the late-July entry “the direct result of the Spanish government’s refusal to secure its borders and defend its people.”President Trump, speaking from Camp David, called the episode a “catastrophe” and likened it to an invasion.“It is relatively unusual for the United States to intervene so directly in a bilateral Spain-Morocco border incident,” Mr. Thomas observes. “The comment reflects a deliberate shift. Washington is signaling that weak European border enforcement has wider consequences for Western security and alliance credibility, not just local Spanish politics.”Ms. Norman sees it somewhat differently. “This was incredibly high profile, so it is not that unusual for Washington to weigh in,” she says, noting that Mr. Trump made similar remarks after the 2015 European refugee crisis.Mr. Schindler characterizes the intervention as consistent with a broader posture.“The current U.S. administration has been looking towards Europe with a very critical eye,” he says. “Hence it was not very surprising that it would comment on such an obvious breakdown of the security of the EU external border controls.”Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has rebuffed the criticism, calling the response from some allies “selfish” even as Spain installed a 500-meter floating barrier off Ceuta’s coast to deter further crossings. The Spanish leader has blamed people-smuggling networks, not his own policies, for the surge, arguing the Supreme Court’s narrow ruling on sea arrivals was twisted into false promises of automatic legal status and used to lure migrants toward the fence.For Ms. Norman, barriers and rhetoric address only half the problem.“Europe needs to focus on a strategy that also gives people the opportunity to migrate via regular pathways,” she stresses, “or else people will continue to attempt to come irregularly, sometimes in very large numbers.”The political infighting offers little comfort to a mother in Ceuta who no longer lets her daughter walk to the beach alone, and few observers see the underlying pressures, legal or economic, easing before the next boat or the next swimmer tests the fence.“I expect the crossings to continue,” Mr. Doran adds, “until the law is changed.”

A Weeping Mother Says Migrants Will ‘Devour’ Her Daughter. What’s Really Happening in Ceuta?

A Weeping Mother Says Migrants Will ‘Devour’ Her Daughter. What’s Really Happening in Ceuta?

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