Did Spain Go Full Trump to End the Ceuta Mass Migration Crisis?

The great Ceuta mass migration crisis—during which a human tsunami of 72,000 North Africans swamped the Spanish enclave on the Moroccan coast on July 30 and 31—could easily have lasted for months. However, it is all over but for some mopping up.

Few, if any more, are coming or adding to the death toll of 75. Most of those who crashed the European Union’s gates at Spain’s Ceuta are back in Morocco. A few thousand migrants remain who are generally harder to return under Spanish/European Union rules—such as sub-Saharan Africans and unaccompanied minors.  

But it is no coincidence that the Spanish-Moroccan border is as quiet as President Donald Trump made the U.S.-Mexico border on about his first day in office.

Spain’s socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez remains unapologetically supportive of illegal immigration and an open-borders advocate. But for one moment, when he was caught in the clinch of a humanitarian and political emergency in front of television cameras, Sanchez appears to have torn a page from the Trump border playbook.

By independent media accounts, Sanchez quickly militarized the Ceuta marine border, provided little, if any, food or shelter, and oversaw the expeditious expulsion of most of the 72,000 who flooded the Spanish territory.

Sanchez will no doubt return to his true open borders colors soon. But the Trump method that ended the Ceuta crisis offers lessons that are crucial to understand—as is how Sanchez and his United States Socialist brethren always start such crises.

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The principle at play when mass migrations start and end is surprisingly self-evident,,, yet somehow still escapes acknowledgement in leftist American policymaking.

When a government admits illegal aliens into its rich country, unlimited millions will surge toward the breach, willing to invest time and money for the effort. Conversely, when a government quickly expels and denies entry, aspiring border crossers stay home, unwilling to risk their time and money.

The principle of what turns these crises on and then off is as universal as it is simple; it is applicable to all countries and geographies in Europe and elsewhere. Yet policies that start mass migration crises can be only found in leftist playbooks, while policies that end them are found in conservative ones. Sanchez crossed the political divide for about a minute when stealing from Trump served him. No doubt he and his fellow travelers hope no one noticed so they can go back to their own damaging playbook.

Take the U.S.-Mexico border as an example of how this works.

Former President Joe Biden sparked off the worst border crisis in American history, pulling in millions of border crossers from 2021-2025, when he let them all in for years at the border on various kinds of asylum or humanitarian protection claims, as I describe in the second chapter of my book “Overrun.” Millions down trail who learned on social media about the good fortunes of those up-trail enthusiastically laid down their smuggling money bet and surged en masse toward the breach to collect their own almost guaranteed entry-and-stay reward to pay it all back and keep earning.

Trump quickly flipped the switch off with policies that have expelled nearly 100% of new crossers that have been caught. Crucially, he ordered Border Patrol and the U.S. military to catch all they could. Not surprisingly, few down trail who learned about this unwanted up-trail outcome were willing to pay smuggling fees or attempt the trip on their own.

Ceuta now stands as just the latest example where this simple approach, which has played out according to script everywhere it has been applied, including countries like Hungary and Poland.

In the Ceuta case, the North Africans flooded in because of Sanchez’s amnesty offer to legalize a half million illegal aliens, followed by a Spanish Supreme Court ruling that greatly slows Spain’s immigration enforcement for migrants arriving by sea.

But Sanchez’s soldiers found ways to encourage almost all of the recent arrivals to go back to Morocco anyway. Word spread fast about unpalatable outcomes (and that the Spaniards weren’t providing food), and no one down-trail wanted to bother trying.

Crisis ended.

The fact that a leftist, illegal immigration advocate like Sanchez resorted to a Trumpian policy goes to show that political leaders on his side of the spectrum actually understand how to enforce immigration but will resort to proven methods only when a crisis threatens their political power.

We saw this on naked display during the great Biden border crisis to shut down the power-threatening Del Rio bridge crisis in about 12 days. The large-scale crisis under the international bridge caught major international media attention in September 2021, when more than 15,000 mostly Haitians poured in from Mexico thinking they’d all be admitted in like thousands of Haitians before them. A political threat for former President Joe Biden developed because every day more were arriving than the administration could release into the country, portending a permanent televised political embarrassment like the one Sanchez recently faced.

The Biden administration ended it fast, though, by ordering Trumpian air deportations it had once publicly condemned. Thousands of Haitians immediately fled back into Mexico and, soon after, not a soul was under the bridge except for workers clearing trash.

Biden then, just like Sanchez now, as well as leftist leaders throughout Europe and in the U.S., still embrace their open borders by interior release policies rather than the principle proven to replace chaos with peace—even though they have shown that they know better.

The Democratic National Committee has not updated its 2024 border security playbook, the last official party word about how it would fix the southern border. The candidates still talk about fixing “root causes” of mass migration by investing U.S. tax money in poor countries and “comprehensive immigration reform” to replace a “broken immigration system” that Trump immediately showed could be put into perfect working order with a little elbow grease.

The so-called New Democratic Coalition, made up of progressive leftists who are on the political rise, issued a policy platform last year that speaks only of amnesty and increasing intake processors at the border to let illegal immigrants into the country for asylum claims—the perfect recipe for another event like those at Ceuta and the Del Rio bridge.

Left-leaning leaders in the U.S.  can’t have missed how their Spanish political compatriot just ended the recent crisis when he was facing real power loss. But they probably averted their eyes and, even if they did see it, will never learn the Ceuta lesson until after the U.S. has suffered real damage.