The Spanish authorities said on Saturday that they were installing a floating barrier near a sea wall between Morocco and the autonomous city of Ceuta, after a surge of tens of thousands of migrants into the territory two days ago raised questions across Europe about Spain’s ability to control its borders.
The announcement, from Spain’s Interior Ministry, came as a vast majority of those migrants appeared to have left Ceuta, a Spanish exclave in North Africa. For those who have stayed, and who have tried to evade the police and angry crowds of locals, the next steps remained unclear.
At least 48,300 of the roughly 50,000 to 60,000 people who entered from Morocco had returned there by late Friday afternoon, according to Spain’s Interior Ministry, while hundreds more continued to leave throughout the night. A spokesperson for Spain’s government in Ceuta said at least 67 people died trying to enter the city in recent days..
The crisis in Ceuta prompted over 20 European Union countries to pen a letter to the European Commission asking for an emergency meeting of interior ministers, even as Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain wrote his own letter to the commission defending his government’s migration policies.
Most of the migrants who entered Ceuta were young Moroccan men seeking work. On Saturday, a few hundred migrants from elsewhere in Africa rested on a beach in the city’s northwest. Many said that they believed Spain could not return them to Morocco because they were from other countries and that they had not eaten since Thursday.
“I don’t want to go to Morocco,” said Kamal Omar, 24, who said he left his home in Sudan in 2023 because of the civil war there and arrived in Morocco last year. “Please give us protection.”
The Spanish government appeared focused so far on bolstering Ceuta’s border with Morocco. In the city on Friday, Mr. Sánchez announced that the country would install buoys to “create a containment barrier, a physical barrier, if only a visual one.”
The buoys will also comply with a recent ruling from Spain’s Supreme Court that prompted the influx of migrants this week, Mr. Sánchez said.
Mr. Sánchez blamed human traffickers for spreading misinterpretations about the ruling, which said that migrants intercepted at sea could not be immediately sent back unless they had bypassed a barrier while trying to reach Spanish territory.
The new structure is an inflatable barrier 500 meters, about 1,600 feet, long that extends as much as one meter below the surface, the Interior Ministry said in a statement. It will be reinforced by an outer line of anchored buoys provided by the Spanish Navy, the ministry said.
Mr. Sánchez’s critics on the right, who have seized on the crisis to portray him as too lax on immigration, have called the measure inadequate.
“You don’t secure a border by putting buoys in the sea,” Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the conservative Popular Party, the main opposition group, said on Friday.
But Mr. Sánchez hit back on Saturday at the many anti-immigrant leaders and far-right politicians in Europe who had blamed his government’s migrant-friendly policies for the crisis.
In a letter to the European Commission, Mr. Sánchez said some European countries “have chosen to attack Spain and to call for its temporary exclusion from the Schengen Area,” which allows for freedom of movement among European states.
“Such an attitude — driven by prejudice, fake news, ignorance or political interest — is not only contrary to European law, humanitarian law and the principles of solidarity that bind us together,” Mr. Sánchez wrote in the letter, which was shared by his office on Saturday.
“It is also contrary to Europe’s long-term interests and to the most basic common sense,” he added, noting that Spain has one of the least porous external borders in the European Union.
Twenty-two European leaders penned their own letter to the European Commission on Saturday, calling for an urgent meeting of interior ministers and a coordinated response to the crossings in Ceuta.
The letter, signed by Prime Ministers Giorgia Meloni of Italy and Mette Frederiksen of Denmark and Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, among others, said the European Union could not allow mass crossings to create the impression “that a migrant’s illegal entry can turn into a legal stay.”
“Such a perception would encourage further attempts, undermine confidence in our common migration policy and have repercussions for all member states,” the leaders wrote.
Ceuta has been governed by Spain for centuries, along with Melilla, another autonomous Spanish city farther east along the same coast. The territories, which have the European Union’s only land borders with Africa, have long been a source of tensions between Spain and Morocco. While Ceuta is part of the European Union and the Schengen Area, it operates under special rules that require additional border controls before people can travel onward to mainland Spain and the rest of the bloc.
On Saturday, young Moroccans were still wandering the outskirts of Ceuta, looking for food or sheltering under tree shade, then rushing into the hills or hiding in the brush when police officers or soldiers approached. But most of the migrants were returning to Morocco by foot or by hitching rides.
Clashes also erupted overnight in Beni Ensar, a Moroccan border town close Melilla, as Morocco’s security forces pushed back people trying to cross the border.
“It was all night yesterday,” said Omar Naji, who works for the local Moroccan Association for Human Rights. “This morning it is calm.”
Aida Alami contributed reporting from Morocco, and Jeanna Smialek from Brussels.
