Ceuta just saw the biggest border crossing in its history, and Spain has already sent almost everyone back
Tens of thousands of people crossed into Ceuta this week, dozens died at sea, and Spain says most have already been returned to Morocco. A Supreme Court ruling sits at the centre of it.
It happened a few hundred kilometres from here and it caught everyone off guard. Over this week, tens of thousands of people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the North African coast, in the largest single influx that border has ever recorded. Many swam, going around the fence through the water. Dozens never reached the other side.
What actually happened in Ceuta?
The Spanish government counts close to 60,000 entries over several days, a figure that dwarfs everything seen there before, including the 2021 crisis. The city has just over 80,000 residents, which tells you what landing that many people in one place looks like. The Interior Ministry says the overwhelming majority have already gone back to Morocco under an arrangement between the two governments, and that returns carried on through the weekend.
The numbers are still being revised hour by hour and are best treated as provisional. The same goes for the human toll: Spanish authorities have confirmed dozens of deaths, with the count climbing as bodies were recovered from the water. That is the part of this story no statistic holds.
Why is a Supreme Court ruling at the centre of this?
Because it lit the fuse, however unintentionally. At the end of June, Spain’s Supreme Court found that people reaching Ceuta or Melilla by sea cannot be summarily returned, because they did not cross the physical border infrastructure the law refers to. Put plainly: swimming around the fence is not the same as climbing it, so those arrivals are owed a formal procedure.
Madrid’s account is that the ruling was twisted and pushed around social media as if it were a guarantee of entry. Pedro Sánchez called the week a violation of Spanish territorial integrity and pointed at smuggling networks, who he says sold the judgment as a ticket. It is an uncomfortable reminder of how a technical judgment, badly retold, can move tens of thousands of people in a week.
Does any of this reach Portugal?
Indirectly, yes. Ceuta is an external EU border, and what gets decided there shapes the tone of the European argument about returns and border control — the same argument that already produced the new European return order rewriting how expulsions work across Schengen and the entry-exit system that will take biometrics from everyone crossing the external border. A week like this tends to speed up whatever was already on the table.
It is also worth separating what happened from the quick takes. This was not a new migration route opening up: it was a window of a few days in which bad information travelled faster than the truth. Official updates are being posted by the Spanish Interior Ministry, which is where the confirmed facts get separated from the noise.
Image: Mario Sánchez Bueno from Ceuta, España / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
