Nando Sigona, University of Birmingham

The speed and scale of the arrivals in Ceuta are difficult to explain as an ordinary migration event. According to provisional Spanish estimates, around 50,000 people crossed from Morocco in approximately 24 hours, at least 57 people have died trying to reach the Spanish enclave. The movement was unprecedented – far larger and faster than the 2021 Ceuta crisis, when around 8,000 people entered over two days.

The profile of those crossing is also significant. Initial accounts suggest that the overwhelming majority were Moroccan citizens, many of them young people from northern Morocco. Some reportedly came from Tétouan, Fnideq and other places close to Ceuta. They were not primarily people completing long, brokered journeys across the African continent. Many simply swam around the breakwater, walked along the shoreline or used improvised flotation devices.

This makes the Spanish government’s emphasis on trafficking and smuggling networks orchestrating the event unconvincing, at least until evidence is produced. There may have been people amplifying information about a recent Spanish Supreme Court judgment restricting immediate returns of those intercepted at sea. But we do not yet know who first circulated this interpretation, whether it spread organically through social media or whether it was deliberately promoted. The low-technology and predominantly local character of the crossings offers little evidence of a more conventional smuggling operation.

More importantly, information circulating online may explain why people decided to move towards Ceuta, but not how such an extraordinary concentration became possible so quickly. Morocco normally operates extensive upstream controls around Fnideq, Belyounech and the roads and beaches leading to the frontier. These measures are designed to identify and disperse gatherings well before people reach the fence or shoreline.

The ability of tens of thousands to assemble close to one of the most intensively monitored borders in the region therefore suggests an unusual relaxation of these controls. This does not necessarily mean that the Moroccan government organised the movement. But the distinction between organising and enabling it is important. Temporarily withholding the preventive policing ordinarily used in the area would have been sufficient to transform widespread aspirations to leave into a spectacular border crisis.

The speed with which many – perhaps most – of those who crossed returned to Morocco is equally revealing. This was not a conventional exodus in which people had invested heavily in reaching Europe and prepared an onward journey. It looked more like a form of organised protest.

The diplomatic context cannot be ignored. The episode follows Pedro Sánchez’s visit to Algeria and Spain’s attempt to rebuild relations damaged by its 2022 endorsement of Morocco’s autonomy proposal for Western Sahara. Algeria is the principal supporter of Polisario and Sahrawi independence, and Western Sahara was reportedly discussed during the visit. It is also the main exporter of gas to Spain. There is no evidence that Spain has itself endorsed independence. But its rapprochement with Algeria may nevertheless have been perceived in Rabat as crossing an important political line.

The evidence does not yet prove that Morocco deliberately relaxed enforcement in response, as was also the case in the previous largest comparable migration event in 2021, which was itself connected to the same diplomatic dispute. But the combination of unprecedented speed, predominantly Moroccan participation, unusually permissive upstream conditions and rapid return bears the hallmarks of coercive migration diplomacy.

There may also be a wider geopolitical dimension. Relations between Sánchez and Donald Trump have deteriorated sharply over Spain’s defence spending, its opposition to the US–Israeli war against Iran and its refusal to allow Spanish bases to be used in military operations. Morocco, meanwhile, has reinforced its strategic alignment with Washington, which under Trump has recognised Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. Particularly striking is that in March 2026 Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official associated with the American Enterprise Institute, openly urged Morocco to organise a new “Green March” of unarmed civilians into Ceuta and Melilla. Rubin does not speak for the Trump administration, and there is no evidence that Washington directed the present movement. But the proposal closely anticipated the use of mass civilian mobility to overwhelm the border and place Sánchez under pressure. The Ceuta episode may therefore have served overlapping interests: Rabat could signal its displeasure at Spain’s rapprochement with Algeria while simultaneously intensifying the wider political pressure being applied to Sánchez by Trump and his European allies.

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