Spain sent military units into Ceuta to shore up overwhelmed police after migrants crossed from Morocco in large numbers, breaking through barriers around the north African enclave and pushing the Guardia Civil beyond capacity.
State broadcaster TVE said between 2,000 and 3,000 people had made it across.
Footage from the border showed hundreds of migrants entering by sea, some swimming and others clinging to inner tubes from the Moroccan side, while more forced their way through a land gate and sprinted into the city.
“It was very tough. The police tried to stop us. But our will and determination allowed us to come here,” migrant Jadid Zacaria, his hair and shirt still wet from the ocean, said in an interview in Ceuta as migrants moved through a border gate nearby.
Madrid said it had dispatched 200 specialised police officers and 60 troops from the Spanish mainland to back up the enclave’s regular security forces.
The sudden surge evoked memories of 2021, when about 10,000 people from Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa, many of them minors, crossed into the city of 85,000 residents over several days.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez will travel to Ceuta tomorrow with Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska for meetings with security forces and local authorities, his office said.
Morocco’s Interior Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A Guardia Civil spokesperson said earlier that migrants were “massively entering from the sea” near the Tarajal breakwater, a border seawall that can be swum around to reach Ceuta.
The spokesperson said police had been overwhelmed, though no estimate of the number of arrivals was immediately available.
Across the city, many shopfronts were closed.
Migrants attempting to swim across the border into Ceuta today
In central Ceuta, Enrique Serrano, who owns a women’s clothing store, said local business owners were preparing to defend themselves because they feared police would not have enough resources to contain the situation.
“I’m not opening this afternoon because the situation is extremely tense… The first thing I have to do is protect my business and my family,” he said, adding that when the fence was breached after midnight, hundreds of migrants rushed through in a matter of minutes.
Ceuta and Melilla – another Spanish autonomous city located in north Africa – form the European Union’s only land frontiers with Africa.
The two enclaves have long seen periodic spikes in attempted crossings by migrants trying to reach Europe.
Images from the scene showed some migrants chanting, “long live Spain” as they entered Spanish territory.
Local government seeks state of emergency
Spain’s Socialist government has set itself apart from many European counterparts with a more pro-migrant approach, recently starting a programme to grant legal status to about 500,000 undocumented migrants, a move that prompted twice as many applications.
Right-wing parties attacked the initiative, saying it would draw more migrants to Spain, and quickly accused Sanchez of letting the Ceuta situation spiral into a crisis.
Conservative opposition People’s Party leader Alberto Nuñez Feijoo said in a post on X: “The situation in Ceuta is desperate. The government cannot look the other way… because we are facing a national security crisis.”
Earlier, Ceuta Mayor Juan Jesus Vivas called on the national government to declare an emergency in response to the mass arrivals.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said on X that the images from Ceuta showed that Sanchez’s migration policy was “misguided.”
A source said Italy was considering restoring border controls for people travelling from Spain to Italy, a route that normally falls within the European Union’s passport-free Schengen area.
Earlier this month, Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that migrants intercepted at sea while trying to reach Ceuta or Melilla cannot be immediately sent back under the enclaves’ special “border rejection” regime, which permits authorities to return people caught crossing the border fences.
Spain’s government said the surge had been triggered by the “exploitation by mafias and criminal organizations” of that ruling, not by its effort to regularise the status of some undocumented migrants.
“It has been a slow trickle since the Supreme Court’s ruling, but today has been an explosion,” the Guardia Civil spokesperson said.
The Interior Ministry said it was coordinating closely with Morocco to respond to the rise in irregular arrivals, after preventing thousands of migrants from entering Ceuta illegally in recent days.
Migrant rights activist Zakaria Zarroqui said people were continuing to gather in the nearby Moroccan city of Fnideq in hopes of crossing into Ceuta, and that the situation remained out of control.
Mauricio Valiente, director of the Spanish Commission for Refugees, which has lawyers working in Ceuta, said those entering the enclave included Moroccan and sub-Saharan migrants, among them families.
