WaPo (“Migrants overrun a Spanish outpost, stirring European outrage“):

The sudden arrival of a massive group of migrants at a Spanish exclave in North Africa triggered a fresh wave of political attacks against Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on both sides of the Atlantic, as voices from the right in Spain, Germany, Italy and France, with the White House joining in, lashed out against Europe’s leading liberal in office.

Spanish officials said nearly 50,000 migrants rushed the Spanish territory over the past 24 hours, swimming or climbing over fences into the small outpost with a population of 83,000, 11 miles from the Spanish mainland and accessible via an hour-long ferry. Most of them have since been sent back. At least 57 people died in the mad dash to Ceuta, Spanish authorities said.

As images of the crush spread quickly via social media, Spain responded, ordering a military deployment Thursday to restore order. On Friday, Spain reinforced security and border fences, with Morocco deploying water cannons to push migrants back.

The migrants were being expelled almost as quickly as they came. By Friday afternoon, around 6 p.m. local time, more than 48,000 had been returned to Morocco through the Tarajal crossing, where the border between Ceuta and Morocco meets the sea, the Spanish Interior Ministry said.

The sudden spike in irregular arrivals — one far greater than the records seen during the region’s 2015 migrant crisis fueled by the Syrian civil war — sparked outrage across the European political spectrum. By comparison, 2,698 migrants had arrived in Ceuta and Melilla, another Spanish exclave, via land during the first six months of the year, according to the Spanish Interior Ministry. In 2015, peak days saw around 11,000 migrants cross in the E.U. territory.

[…]

Migrants interviewed by Spanish media on the ground said they had mobilized after seeing messages via phone and social media networks suggesting the border was “open” and their passage would not be hindered.

Morocco’s ambassador in Spain, Karima Benyaich, said in public remarks that the migration had unfolded “outside of our will” and that Morocco “wants these citizens to return to our country,” according to media reports.

Speaking Friday from Ceuta, Sánchez sought to defend the government’s response, including additional deployments of police and civil guards. He said authorities would place buoys in the breakwaters to act as a “containment barrier.”

He decried the arrivals as a “violation” of Spanish territory, noting that irregular arrivals to Spain had been decreasing before this week.

“This situation is unprecedented,” he said. “It breaks the trend that we have been recording throughout Spain of a systematic reduction year after year, month by month, in the arrivals of irregular migrants.”

POLITICO (“Ceuta crisis rattles European capitals“) adds:

Chaotic images of people pouring into Ceuta, an autonomous Spanish city of about 80,000 people and one of the European Union’s only two land borders with Africa, are reverberating across Europe — especially among right-wing and far-right parties who are seizing on the politically radioactive incident to call for heightened restrictions on migration.

“The images coming from Ceuta are shocking and demonstrate, once again, that uncontrolled illegal immigration poses a real threat to the security of Europe’s borders,” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wrote Thursday on X, saying her country was prepared to push to have Spain shut out of the Schengen Area, the 29-country zone where internal border controls have largely been abolished. Italy’s right-wing government said on Friday it was ending free air and sea transport with Spain, calling the temporary suspension of Schengen with Spain “a necessary choice.”

Meloni’s sentiments were echoed by Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party, and by Finnish Interior Minister Mari Rantanen, a member of the right-wing Finns Party.

Reflecting the fresh political pressure on Europe’s passport-free travel zone, Rantanen accused Spain of failing to “protect the Schengen Area’s external border from infiltration,” adding that “all European countries must support Meloni’s proposal.”

Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson mirrored those comments, saying that his migration minister was “in contact with his Nordic counterparts and does not rule out taking the measures required to ensure that 2015 does not happen again,” referring to another migration crisis when more than one million refugees and migrants traveled to Europe, fleeing wars in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Austria’s Migration Minister Claudia Bauer told POLITICO her government backs Meloni and accused Spain of “effectively handing out entry tickets to the European Union” by granting legal status to more than 1 million unauthorized migrants, calling the scheme a “disastrous decision.”

In response to the crisis, French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez announced Friday that he had ordered increased controls at the border with Spain over fears that the thousands of migrants who reportedly forced their way into Ceuta could travel unimpeded throughout the Schengen area.

That announcement came after Marine Le Pen, the leading far-right candidate ahead of next year’s French presidential election, urged the government to “step up border controls” and vowed to “limit Schengen free movement to EU nationals” if elected president next year.

Conservative presidential candidate Bruno Retailleau, who preceded Nuñez as interior minister, said it was “more than ever necessary” to “ostracize Spain from the European community,” and that the “irresponsible socialist government” led by Spain’s center-left Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had made the passport-free travel area “untenable.”

Not surprisingly, the American right has seized on this as well. From the above-linked WaPo report:

In the United States, a spectrum of right-wing voices from MAGA influencers to the White House latched on to the viral images.

“I saw Spain yesterday, and I watched the catastrophe that took place,” President Donald Trump said Friday. “It was like an invasion of a country by hundreds of thousands of people. And that same thing is going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected, except worse, much bigger, much easier to get into, despite the fact that we have built thousands of miles of wall.”

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who has helped shape Trump’s anti-migration crackdown, shared a video of migrants rushing Ceuta by sea and land, claiming that Democrats would “rejoice” over the images of “your home trampled and stolen by invaders.”

The team at Zeteo, led by the leftist journalist and self-described “all-round troublemaker” Mehdi Hasan, is crying foul (“The Fake ‘Invasion’ of Spain: What You Need to Know“). They want us to know 9 things, the last 7 of which are behind a paywall. The first is indeed worth pointing out.

There’s a lot of misinformation, racism, and xenophobia driving the hysterical response from the right in the U.S., UK, and European Union. So, what really happened? Here are nine things you should know about the fake “invasion” of Spain:

1. Ceuta Is Not in Europe

Although the six-mile-long peninsula is a Spanish enclave, Ceuta isn’t in mainland Spain. The city lies on Morocco’s northern coast. It has been under Spanish control since 1580 and is one of two Spanish cities that form the European Union’s only land borders with Africa, the other being Melilla. While Ceuta is part of the EU and the Schengen Area, it operates under special rules that restrict people from entering mainland Spain and the rest of the EU.

So, certainly, the European mainland is not in danger. Still, 1580 was quite some time ago!

And, alas, the second thing we need to know isn’t all that compelling:

2. At Least 80% of the Migrants Have Already Returned to Morocco Voluntarily

More than 48,000 people of the estimated 60,000 who breached Ceuta’s border have now returned to Morocco voluntarily, a clear contradiction of the claims of many right-wingers who called it an ‘invasion.’ At least 57 people died during the journey.

First off, returning in the face of armed soldiers is “voluntary” in only the least restrictive sense. And 60,000 minus 48,000 still leaves 12,000. That’s rather a lot, given that Ceuta’s population is something like 83,500 and the migrants were decidedly not invited.

The third thing we need to know is

3. Trump and Israel Are Not Fans of the Spanish Government

Why we need to know this is, alas, paywalled. Offhand, though, it doesn’t explain why sovereign Spanish territory being flooded with 60,000 uninvited migrants in a single day is a fake invasion.

Is some of the reaction xenophobic? Sure. Then again, at some level, the existence of borders at all is xenophobic.

That the migrants are almost certainly Arab and Muslim doubtless spawns more animosity than if they were, say, Swedes. Then again, we seldom see hordes of Swedes rushing the border.