Thousands of Moroccans Storm Across the Border into Spain's Ceuta

On Thursday around noon, thousands of people crossed the border between Morocco and the Spanish exclave of Ceuta with no controls in place — first over land, and then by swimming around the border breakwater separating the two countries, Spanish newspaper El País reports.

According to the outlet, the situation overnight had been relatively calm, with only dozens of people swimming into the city, but by midday it had spiralled completely out of control. People arrived soaked to the skin but triumphant — hugging each other, searching for dry clothes to dry out their phones, and cheering loudly. Some carried children in their arms as they pressed on, presumably heading toward the migrant reception centre.

The Civil Guard and emergency services, completely overwhelmed, are now focused solely on helping those in distress. Some migrants reached the border utterly exhausted, almost unconscious, while others dashed onto the coastal road oblivious to traffic, shouting "Long live Spain!" and throwing their shoes into the air. Some dropped to their knees right in the middle of the road and kissed the ground.

Spain's left-wing government, led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, began a process on April 16 this year to legalise roughly half a million undocumented migrants already in the country.

According to the newspaper, no one yet knows how to cope with a humanitarian crisis of this scale. The migrant reception centre has been over capacity for several days, with no beds available and its gates now closed. Hundreds, then thousands, of people are gathering outside its grounds — an influx so massive that organised registration and accommodation of new arrivals has become effectively impossible. Many of the migrants are young men, often without shoes, their feet cut up from the coastal rocks.

The paper notes that Thursday's mass wave of migration marked an escalation of problems that had been building in previous days, with Ceuta's authorities repeatedly appealing to the Spanish government for help. The situation is starting to resemble the serious migration crisis of 2021, when around five thousand Moroccans crossed the border in a single day.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz