“It was a disaster,” says Francesca Fusaro of humanitarian NGO No Name Kitchen, whose six volunteers ran out of food and supplies almost immediately. They had already been responding to some three thousand crossing attempts throughout 2026. Now supermarket shelves were running empty, with no hope of adequate resupply for days.

Images of a small community being overwhelmed were beamed around the world and seized upon in order to argue for more extreme border enforcement. But the chaos in Ceuta was the result of enforcement, not its absence.

The Ceuta border was fenced off thirty years ago, as Europe shut down traditional circular migration patterns where North Africans regularly freely crossed back and forth. This immediately led to a spike in migration by those who feared permanently losing access to Europe.

In the post 9/11-wave of mass securitization, border surveillance and enforcement hardened more. The EU assumed new powers, with its new border agency Frontex deploying with Spanish forces off North Africa in 2006. Moroccan authorities’ violent clearance of migrant camps near the exclaves in 2015 did not prevent further crossings either; nor did the 2022 Melilla massacre in which dozens of people were killed by Spanish and Moroccan forces at the border.

Thirty years of criminalizing migration has produced an environment where refugees and migrants rely on smugglers and more occasional chaotic mass crossings.

In this case, despite talk of the EU being overwhelmed, Spanish forces in Ceuta oversaw large-scale returns the following day. But we should also ask: At what cost? How many people were unable to exercise their right to present an asylum claim before being forced back? How were suspected crossers identified, as Ceuta residents of Moroccan origin reported hiding in their homes, fearing racial profiling? Could more have been done to prevent deaths?

These are searching questions, but unfortunately, they are unlikely to be asked. Border deaths are now normalized, and when the issue registers in public discourse (with the notable exception of Pope Leo’s call for more humanity in the migration debate during a recent visit to Lampedusa) it’s usually to make things worse. Last month, the EU passed hard-line new deportation laws, inaugurated to cheers of “send them back” led by far-right legislators.

Ceuta is a test not just for Europe’s morals but for its organizing capacities. The harsh new Migration Pact, much criticized by human rights defenders, was supposed to forge European unity in such situations. Instead, the response to Ceuta has been messy, further discombobulating the bloc. Spain’s Pedro Sánchez has slammed some European leaders’ reaction as “selfish and unlawful.”

When we zoom out further from Ceuta, we can see a bigger story about migration control and its relationship to geopolitical chaos.

In Spain, many have accused Morocco of “weaponizing” migration; deliberately sponsoring the crossing as a part of a bigger power game, directed against Sánchez’s center-left government. Spanish security services claimed both in 2021 and now that Moroccan intelligence agents were embedded among those crossing.

Contrary to the belief that globalization would solve conflicts by binding rivals’ interests together, the weaponization of interdependence is now more common, with states exploiting their role in complex global networks to win conflicts (the closure of the Strait of Hormuz being the most obvious current example).

Around Europe, the accusation of “weaponized migration” is frequent. Turkey was accused of intentionally facilitating crossings to Greece in 2020, Morocco to Spain and Belarus to Poland in 2021, Russia to Finland in 2023, and Eastern Libya to Greece in 2025. There is evidence of such a strategy at play in all these cases; but it’s first worth asking what is being weaponized.

The accusation itself has major implications for people migrating. Seeing them as the mute tools of states or smugglers forestalls a reckoning with who they are and what has compelled them to move. Worse, treating them as mere pawns helps justify violence against them. Turkish, Greek, and Belarusian actions have been used to defend EU forces shooting at refugees, imprisoning them, refusing to aid them, and suspending international law, all in the name of responding to an attack by hostile states. It is a narrative instrument for dehumanization.

The height of irregular border crossings in 2015–16 only ever constituted less than 1 percentage point of the European population (the continent’s largest displaced population are Ukrainians, whose international protection was formalized and facilitated.) Europe is surrounded by much poorer nations who hold vastly higher numbers of refugees, insulating the EU from the pressures of global crises, including ones for which Europeans bear hefty responsibility, such as wars in West Asia and climate change.

The EU and European states in turn bribe or coerce neighboring countries to adopt harsher migration enforcement, exporting chains of abuse around the world. European financing and diplomatic cover supports illegal deportations in Turkey, violence by border forces from Croatia to Saudi Arabia, a regime of slavery and torture for migrants in Libya, and mass strandings in deserts in Morocco and Tunisia where mostly black people are rounded up and left for dead. EU public money now even pays for patrol boats that shoot at European rescue ships. The “norm” in Moroccan-Spanish border cooperation is violence, culminating in the aforementioned Melilla massacre of 2022.

European states have signaled to the world, first, that the EU’s internal political crises forestall any ability to behave rationally on migration issues and, second, that Europe depends on external states and entities, including authoritarian governments and militias, to do its dirty work. It is entirely unsurprising when states at the subordinate end of a grim transactional relationship do not always point the gun where they are told to.

None of this, of course, means ignoring how states do manipulate migration routes.

Spain’s position on Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara appears to have motivated Morocco’s permission of the last mass Ceuta crossing in 2021 and also to be a factor in this one.

Morocco not only criminalizes dissent at home but is a key border control, surveillance tech, and military partner for European and NATO forces, as well as a potential key supplier of critical raw materials. Its ties to Israel and the United States — including apparently recently naming a highway after Donald Trump — have prompted some Spanish commentators to see US and/or Israeli involvement in the Ceuta incident.

The evidence presented is, thus far, circumstantial at best. Undoubtedly, a US-Israel axis has exploited the incident to relentlessly troll Spain in response for its defiance; with Israel’s United Nations rep accusing Spain of settler colonialism, others demanding it cede Ceuta and Melilla to Morocco, and the White House reasserting support for the illegal Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara.

The US-Israel axis is also deeply involved in the political economy of EU migration violence. A US military surveillance firm that flies spying missions over Gaza also flies for Frontex, supporting Libyan forces to intercept people fleeing. (Frontex also fields Israeli-made Heron surveillance drones.) The United States is seeking deportation deals with Libya and a brace of the same countries in which Europe also aims to set up an archipelago of gray-zone offshore detention camps.

Because of its moderately heterodox foreign policy, Spain has now become a major thorn in the side of US attempts at extending its hegemony in Europe — blocking its tech companies, refusing to allow its air bases to be used to extend the US war on Iran, and being vocal in its opposition to genocide in Palestine. Its stance may also have emboldened others, such as France. A general election is upcoming in Spain, and the far right will attempt to use polarization over migration to destabilize the government.

Spanish Premier Sánchez has been on a long journey since his government’s 2022 intervention at NATO, which caused the bloc to list irregular migration as a threat for the first time. The military and Guardia Civil in Ceuta may have upheld Fortress Europe by force, but a wider story is the recent large-scale regularization of Spain’s undocumented population, allowing them access to work, rights, and pathways to citizenship. The policy is a rare exception to harsher migration controls springing up across the West and has also prompted pushback.

The Spanish right, backed by US conservatives’ influencer-industrial complex, argues that Sánchez’s policy encouraged the Ceuta crossing. Misleading information does seem to have played a role; people crossing were told that they could not be deported or that the border was open. However, if there was really a strong link between crossings and government migration stances, Giorgia Meloni’s Italy would not remain a leading destination for those crossing the Central Mediterranean.

In Ceuta, many locals have been welcoming and done their best to help; a demonstration in support of refugees drew hundreds. But a minority have, according to some reports, attempted to form mobs to prevent people crossing.

In the exclaves where Francisco Franco’s forces once gathered and prepared to storm the Spanish Republic, their mainland descendants are now encouraging activists to “defend the border.” This incident cannot be separated from a coordinated push on multiple fronts — principally a barrage of artificial-intelligence-generated slop about Muslim invasions of Spain — to destabilize the last middleweight European power with a social democratic government.

Five years ago, I wrote about a past Ceuta crossing, arguing that a rapid increase in border militarization would become states’ maladaptive “solution” to a climate-stricken world.

In Morocco, years of crippling droughts have combined with state mismanagement and the long-run effects of a debt crisis and structural adjustment imposed by international financial institutions to produce a youth unemployment crisis severe enough to make tens of thousands risk a dangerous sprint into the unknown.

Spain is now installing a giant floating barrier on the Ceuta coast; similar barriers built by the Trump administration in Mexico and installed earlier this year have been ripped off their moorings by floodwaters and sent slaloming down the Rio Grande Valley, forcing arterial roads to shut.

Today around Ceuta, wildfires rage across North Africa. On the European side, Spanish and French cities are thick with smoke, and even temperate corners of Britain are burning. Some 270,000 Europeans have been forced from their homes — a salutary reminder that displacement is a growing feature in everyone’s lives, not only of those in lower-income countries.

As real crises accelerate, with wars, environmental breakdown, political polarization, economic stagnation, and inequality, and the explosion of dangerous technologies in the hands of a few, establishment discourse continues to obsess about migration while we burn. This scapegoating strategy is only deepening.

Ceuta has also sharply revealed how disarticulated the politics of such issues can be. Watching right-wingers attack Spain as a colonial force in North Africa while some on the Left call for harsher border controls has been deeply odd. Yet these contradictions aren’t about to disappear.

There will be more Ceutas: more people seeking safety and escape from multiplying crises, more border regimes that make their journeys more dangerous, and more actors seeking to instrumentalize humanitarian emergencies for various political ends. A socialist politics that can digest and respond to these complexities both operationally and politically is urgent.

Migration is many things: a humanitarian emergency, a social and economic opportunity, a reflection of local and global inequality and strife, and a vector for large-scale exploitation. Most governments responsible for violence at borders do not really want to stop it so much as ensure it takes place in conditions that keep migrants vulnerable and exploitable — also making racialized injustice more certain.

Engaging with these multiple realities is a prerequisite for addressing them. A focus on borders, whether on opening them or closing them, is no substitute for a broader transformative politics. This involves safe and planned migration routes. But it also involves breaking out of an interminable “migration debate” about costs and benefits and into a domestic call for labor protections and high-quality public services for all, and an international call to end inequality, extractive economies, wars, and environmental breakdown.

Incidents like those at Ceuta require a politics that can process both the rival moves of states and empires, and the movement of a teenage boy, arms thrashing in the warm water on a scorching-hot day, seeking a better shore.