On 29 June 2026, the administrative litigation chamber of Spain’s Supreme Court settled a minor case, opened after the immediate return to Morocco of an Algerian national intercepted while swimming towards Ceuta in November 2024. The ruling, confirmed in early July, established that the law does not allow automatic border rejection for anyone crossing by swimming, since swimming does not amount to breaching a fence or any other physical containment barrier. Five weeks later, tens of thousands of people crossed into Ceuta, convinced by a chain of WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok messages that Spain had opened its border. Dozens of people died in the attempt. Italy unilaterally suspended the Schengen regime with Spain, the zone that since 1995 has allowed passport-free travel between most European countries, twenty-two countries signed a letter demanding that Brussels strip Madrid of control over its external borders, and Donald Trump turned the scene into an electoral warning for his own country. In no official statement by any of these actors is the court mentioned, the same court that, two years earlier, set the whole sequence in motion.
The Algerian case and the ruling of 29 June
The case does not begin with a crisis. It begins with an ordinary administrative procedure. In November 2024, an Algerian national was intercepted at sea while attempting to reach Ceuta by swimming, and immediately handed over to Moroccan authorities under the mechanism known in Spain as border rejection, which allows summary return of anyone attempting to cross by breaching fences or other containment elements, bypassing the ordinary expulsion procedure with its full legal safeguards. The decision was appealed. The State Attorney’s Office defended the return. The Supreme Court, in its ruling of 29 June, sided with the appellant.
The court’s reasoning is narrow and technical, almost dull, which takes nothing away from its consequences. The provision governing border rejection applies to anyone who breaches a border containment element, a fence, a wall, a physical barrier. Whoever enters the water and swims breaches nothing of the sort, since there is nothing physical there to overcome, no fence, no wall, no checkpoint. The ruling does not prevent deporting that person, it only prevents doing so through the summary route, obliging the administration to follow the ordinary expulsion procedure, with a lawyer, with set deadlines, and with the possibility of claiming asylum before removal. In practice, that difference decides whether someone is turned back within minutes on the shoreline, with no record of who they were or what they fled, or spends days in a reception centre while a caseworker reviews their file, a gap wide enough to separate summary removal from an actual hearing.
This technical nuance sits alongside an uncomfortable precedent. In February 2020, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights had ruled the opposite way in the case of N.D. and N.T. versus Spain, upholding the border rejection of two men who had scaled the Melilla fence in 2014, overturning an earlier 2017 ruling against Spain. That European judgment referred explicitly to those who breach a physical containment element, a fence with barbed wire, guarded. Spain’s Supreme Court, six years later, does not contradict it, it narrows it, excluding precisely anyone who climbs no fence because they enter through open water.
There is no contradiction between the two courts, because they answer different questions. Strasbourg’s Grand Chamber assessed whether Spain could collectively expel those who forced a mass entry through the fence without exhausting any legal channel, and concluded it could. Spain’s Supreme Court, in June 2026, did not assess that. It assessed only whether swimming amounts, under the exact terms of Spanish law, to breaching a physical containment element. Two courts answering two distinct legal questions, not two courts in disagreement.
It is a ruling that extends a procedural safeguard already provided for under Spanish law for other cases, not an open door nor an invitation.
From ruling to rumour
What happened next bears no legal relation to the content of the ruling, though it bears a causal one to its existence. In late July, Instagram accounts began spreading messages claiming the Ceuta border would remain open. Facebook posts followed with crossing routes, and TikTok videos showing where to swim and how to evade the coastguard. The messages were direct, “Ceuta’s door is open”, “today is the day”, “Tetouan, let’s go”. The gathering grew in Fnideq into a human current no control managed to contain. The Moroccan outlet Alyaoum24 attributed the campaign to WhatsApp groups with “perverse aims”, timed deliberately to coincide with Throne Day, which marks the coronation of Mohammed VI, as if the secondary aim were to expose border disorder on the most symbolic date of Morocco’s official calendar.
Spain estimated close to 60,000 entries within days and deployed more than 2,500 troops alongside the Guardia Civil and National Police. A 500 metre pneumatic barrier was installed at the Tarajal breakwater, submerged up to a metre, to slow the swimming crossings that June’s ruling had excluded from automatic rejection. Morocco, in a statement issued three days after the crisis began, put the figure at 40,000 entries and attributed the episode to “overlapping factors”, without naming the Spanish court ruling among them, while beginning to bus hundreds of migrants to different parts of the country.
Spain’s Guardia Civil recovered 67 bodies along the Ceuta coastline after the crossing attempt, a figure cited by Emol and other outlets, while Morocco reported 11 bodies recovered in its own waters, a separate count by jurisdiction rather than a contradictory figure.
Disinformation explains how the panic spread, not why something real lay behind the panic people clung to. A ruling that had genuinely changed the procedure for anyone arriving by swimming gave a false rumour an anchor of plausibility no earlier migration rumour ever had.
International politics chooses not to talk about judges
Italy acted first. Giorgia Meloni’s government suspended the Schengen regime with Spain on 1 August for one month, closing its air and sea borders to non-EU nationals. Meloni called it an “extraordinary measure” to “safeguard national security”. It was the first time a member state had unilaterally suspended Schengen against another over a migration policy disagreement, rather than a terrorist threat.
The suspension was not symbolic. For a month, travelling from Rome to Madrid stopped being a passport-free airport formality and once again required a checked passport, with the delays and queues Schengen itself was designed, in 1995, to eliminate among its members.
The letter arrived days later. Signed by twenty-two countries and co-drafted by Meloni alongside Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen, it demanded an emergency meeting of EU interior ministers and warned that “the European Union cannot allow uncontrolled mass crossings” nor tolerate “the instrumentalisation of migration”. Frederiksen belongs to the Party of European Socialists, the same political family as Sánchez’s PSOE. Her signature is neither accidental nor the product of outside pressure. Denmark has, since 2019, applied under social-democratic governments some of the continent’s most restrictive migration policies, including a law authorising the confiscation of asylum seekers’ valuables above a certain amount to fund their own upkeep. Five countries, Spain among them, chose to stay outside the letter.
Donald Trump, from Camp David, brought the episode onto his own electoral terrain. He said he had seen “the catastrophe” in Spain and warned the same would happen to the United States “in three years” should the election go against his side. The White House attributed the crisis to Sánchez’s “far left globalist policies”, without his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, issuing any statement of his own. Vox, in Spain, folded into the same speech the arrival of young Moroccans and the regularisation of Latin American residents the government had been processing for months, with no connection between the two processes. Sánchez responded by invoking European treaties and the facts, arguing that cooperation with Morocco had been “constant, fluid and very reasonable”. In none of these statements, by any actor, in any language, is the Supreme Court or its ruling of 29 June ever mentioned.
The selectivity of panic
No one, in that international chorus, mentions either why tens of thousands of young people were willing to risk their lives over a WhatsApp rumour. Youth unemployment in Morocco stands close to 35 per cent. Between 2015 and 2024, the country lost 1.2 million rural jobs, a fall linked to increasingly frequent droughts that hit agriculture and family incomes. Economic growth forecast for 2026, near 3.7 per cent, rests on investment that does not generate enough jobs for a generation more educated than the last, with fewer real opportunities. A false rumour only moves that many people when the life left behind already offers nothing left to lose.
While Ceuta filled front pages, Spain was processing, through an entirely separate channel, the administrative regularisation of people who had lived in its territory for years. The royal decree allows regularisation for those who requested international protection before 31 December 2025, or can prove at least five months of residence, with processing scheduled between April and 30 June 2026. Added to the Democratic Memory Law, which grants nationality to descendants of exiles, the Popular Party estimates the government will end up legalising up to 3.5 million people, and warned of the risk that the process could become a “loophole” for unverified criminal records.
Of the 840,000 people in irregular status the decree seeks to regularise, 760,000 come from the Americas, with Colombia the leading country of origin at close to 290,000 people, followed by Peru and Honduras.
A young Moroccan crossing by swimming because of a false rumour and a Colombian who has spent five years working undocumented in Madrid share no origin, no route, no legal status, no link whatsoever to the same government decision. The rhetoric that fuses them into the word avalanche does not describe a phenomenon, it manufactures one. And that manufacture needs, in order to work, for no one to mention the court that made possible the scene that made it plausible.
For the European right, naming it would mean admitting the origin lies in an extension of procedural safeguards, not a weakness of Sánchez’s, which would instantly wreck the invasion narrative sustaining the letter of the twenty-two and Italy’s Schengen suspension. For Sánchez, naming it would mean publicly defending an independent judicial decision he did not issue, does not control, and is already being billed for at every European summit regardless, so he prefers to speak of treaties and cooperation with Rabat. For Trump, naming it serves no purpose at all, because his electorate does not need a Spanish court, it needs an image of chaos confirming what it already believes about the global left. Each actor builds, from the same raw material, a different story useful only to itself.
None of the three has anything to gain from precision. The ruling of 29 June will go on existing, published, searchable, ignored, while Brussels argues over competences, while Rome counts down its suspension, while Washington turns it into a campaign advertisement. The dead in the water off Ceuta, at least, have no spokesperson…
G.S.
Sources
- Spain’s Supreme Court confirms the law does not allow hot returns of migrants attempting to enter Ceuta and Melilla by swimming
- This is the ruling that triggered the assault on Ceuta by thousands of migrants by sea
- The key points of the Supreme Court ruling on hot returns in Ceuta
- Hot returns in the case of N.D. and N.T. versus Spain (ECHR Grand Chamber, 13 February 2020)
- Ceuta, how the disinformation campaign fuelled the mass arrival of migrants at the Spanish border
- Morocco breaks its silence on Ceuta, attributes it to overlapping factors
- Ceuta crisis, death toll among Moroccan migrants rises to 67
- Government installs a 500 metre barrier at the Tarajal breakwater in Ceuta
- Italy follows through on its threat and suspends the Schengen agreement with Spain
- Different borders, different concerns, why 22 EU countries signed a letter
- Meloni uses Ceuta against Sánchez, Italy leads 22 countries to blame Spain for regularising migrants
- Trump attacks Sánchez over the chaos in Ceuta
- The lack of prospects, inequality and unemployment are driving the exodus of young people in Morocco
- Government to legalise 3.5 million immigrants through mass regularisation and the Memory Law
