Spain's PM denies Morocco facilitated Ceuta border breach despite police report

On Thursday morning, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez stood before parliament and made a categorical claim: Spain possessed no evidence whatsoever that Morocco had planned or facilitated the mass crossing into Ceuta that had unfolded in late July. His statement came a day after roughly 50,000 people marched through Madrid to protest his handling of the crisis, and it directly contradicted a police report—commissioned by a judge and circulated widely in the media—that alleged Moroccan border forces had actively assisted approximately 70,000 people in breaching the border.

Sánchez's defense of Morocco has been consistent throughout the emergency. He emphasized that no diplomatic service, no European Commission body, no international organization had furnished the Spanish government with solid proof of Moroccan government involvement. He also insisted the government had received no advance warning of the crossing's scale or likelihood. Yet his position contained an internal tension: while denying Moroccan facilitation at the governmental level, he acknowledged that Moroccan forces had permitted crossings to happen during a critical ten-hour window on July 30. Many of those who crossed reported being actively encouraged to do so by Moroccan officials, who have since denied enabling the movement.

The political cost of Sánchez's stance has been immediate and severe. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the conservative People's Party, called for his resignation, accusing him of incompetence and complicity. Santiago Abascal of the far-right Vox party delivered a sharper rebuke, suggesting that Morocco needed no ambassador in Spain because Sánchez himself had become one. The prime minister did take one concrete step: on August 21, Spain summoned Morocco's ambassador to object to what he termed unacceptable statements made by two Moroccan ministers reasserting Rabat's sovereignty claims over Ceuta and Melilla, Spain's other North African territory.

The human toll of the breach remains stark. As many as 141 people died attempting to enter Ceuta at the end of July. Though roughly 90 percent of the 70,000 who crossed returned to Morocco within 24 hours—a return Sánchez credited to Moroccan cooperation—several thousand remained stranded in the enclave. Among them were at least 500 minors, living on streets or in makeshift shelters with no clear legal pathway forward. Sánchez reminded parliament that Spanish, European, and international law guaranteed migrants the right to individual treatment and due process. "You can't just grab someone by the arm and drag them across the frontier as though they were a sack of dirt," he told MPs, an implicit rejection of calls from Vox to forcibly return the remaining migrants to Morocco.

The crisis has exposed fractures within the European Union over immigration responsibility. Sánchez appealed for European solidarity, pointedly noting that the principle should apply to Ceuta as much as it does to Greenland and Lampedusa—a veiled criticism of Italy and Denmark, which had publicly criticized Spain's response. The government appears to be moving toward investing in facilities within Ceuta to house the remaining migrants rather than risk the political backlash that would follow transferring them to mainland Spain. Some migrants, facing hunger and local hostility, have already begun returning to Morocco voluntarily.

Sánchez framed the underlying challenge in economic terms: Ceuta's per capita income is eight times that of Morocco. The disparity, he suggested, creates a pressure that no border wall, however high, can fully contain. "Even if we build a wall 100 metres high there will still be people prepared to throw themselves into the sea to get across," he said. His government's stated goal is to help Ceuta emerge from the crisis stronger and more integrated with Spain and the European Union—a formulation that acknowledges the breach as a symptom of deeper structural inequalities rather than a discrete security failure.