On June 29, the Supreme Court of Spain ruled that authorities cannot use fast-track, summary expulsions on migrants who enter the country by swimming around or arriving via the maritime border at North African exclaves like Ceuta and Melilla.
Spain is a main point of arrival into Europe for migrants seeking better economic opportunities, education, and financial stability or an escape from violence in their home countries.
The ruling means that migrants intercepted at sea must receive basic processing, identification, and legal safeguards rather than immediate pushbacks, but smugglers and traffickers reportedly misrepresented it to imply that arriving by sea meant no deportations could happen at all.
As rumors were spread on social media that the heavily fortified border could be easily breached, a massive surge of crossings ensued.
Tens of thousands of illegals, mainly military age males, managed to breach the frontier and poured into the country, but at least 18 Moroccans died trying to reach the tiny Spanish territory of Cueta. Others gave up and returned to, in The New York Times' words, Morocco's deep structural economic crisis, generational despair, and a severe crack down on domestic dissent.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, compares the mass migration into Spain to the surge of illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden administration.
"While this is really bad for Spain and Europe, it may actually be good for America in the sense that it's an object lesson in what happens if you hand immigration policy over to the kind of anti-sovereignty, anti-borders people who have now come to dominate the Democratic Party," he submits.
Though America's asylum policies are not as feckless as those of Europe, he says, "It's all part of the same outdated system from the Cold War that essentially facilitates mass illegal immigration."
Young men are statistically more likely to commit violent crime than women or children, so a migration flow dominated by that demographic deserves greater security scrutiny. Democrats, however, argue that many of those men are genuinely fleeing poverty, political instability, or persecution and say it is common worldwide for one family member—often the father or eldest son because illegal crossings are dangerous—to migrate first before bringing relatives later.
During a televised Cabinet meeting at Camp David last week, President Donald Trump described the migrant crisis in Spain as a "catastrophe" and an "invasion" and warned that a similar situation would happen in the United States if Republicans lose future elections.
