Marrakech – The Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH), through its Nador section, has condemned what it calls racist far-right gangs waging an open campaign against migrants and asylum seekers in the Spanish-occupied city of Ceuta.
The organization described a pattern of “chases, violence, and the blocking of aid,” carried out, in its words, “amid the silence and complicity of the authorities of the city of Ceuta.”
By the AMDH’s account, the assailants have moved to “a more dangerous stage” by hunting down the activists who deliver relief to migrants and document the violations committed against them.
The group warned of “direct threats to these activists and the publishing of their photos,” a tactic meant, it charged, to “force them to leave the arena so they can brutalize the migrants as they please.”
View this post on Instagram
The association went further still. It accused the racist gangs of issuing “public calls to all their members in Spain and across Europe to come to Ceuta” in order to “complete the execution of their crimes against migrants and all anti-racist activists.” It termed this “a dangerous situation that requires urgent intervention,” then laid the blame squarely on Ceuta’s authorities.
Rather than discharge their duty, the AMDH charged, those authorities “prefer not only to turn a blind eye,” but at times “intervene to arrest the activists and level serious accusations against them, instead of arresting the armed racist gangs that operate freely.”
That indictment of official connivance follows the most violent stretch since tens of thousands crossed into the enclave. At least 72,000 people entered Ceuta from Morocco on July 30 and 31, most of them swimming around the border fence, and at least 100 died during the crossing, per figures from the city’s mayor. The vast majority returned within hours; several thousand remain, many of them unaccompanied children, sleeping on beaches and streets.
The vigilantism has hardened into something closer to mob rule since Wednesday. On Wednesday night, hundreds of Moroccan migrants sleeping rough on Ceuta’s El Trampolín beach endured a city turning against their presence.
View this post on Instagram
Residents waving Spanish flags marched through the enclave, chanting for the migrants to leave and trying to block Red Cross vehicles from delivering food. Police fired tear gas to keep the crowds apart, then charged demonstrators who pushed into the area where the migrants had bedded down, with some of their belongings set ablaze. Left stranded and exposed, the migrants faced a long night on the shore.
The following day brought no relief. On Thursday, dozens of locals blocked a Red Cross truck for more than two hours while chanting that “the Red Cross is a mafia,” then moved on to informal settlements, where migrant shelters and belongings were burned.
Vigilante groups pursued migrants through the streets, and journalists and film crews reported threats. A Vox member of Congress, José María Figaredo, now faces investigation for a possible hate crime after he called for migrants to be “hunted down, one by one.”
‘We can no longer work’
The intimidation has driven humanitarian workers into retreat. Chadi Boukhari, coordinator of Border Resistance, told elDiario.es his team was preparing to leave Ceuta for good: “We can no longer work.”
His verdict was flat – “we can resist authorities, the military, everything, but we cannot resist fascist groups.” Amnesty International reported threats against Red Cross and other personnel and the obstruction of food and water distribution.
The street violence has a digital twin. The two days of the crossing alone produced 9,590 hate messages on Spanish social media, according to the Observatory of Racism and Xenophobia (OBERAXE), while the FARO system logged 57,406 pieces of hate speech across July, up from 40,800 in June.
North Africans absorbed 68% of that content; 40% of the messages dehumanized their targets, 38% cast them as a threat, and one message in twenty incited expulsion or outright violence.
This is not spontaneous rage but the harvest of a deliberate ideological project. Spain’s far right trades in a manufactured historical panic that recasts the migrant as the returning Moor and the crossing as a second Islamic conquest of Iberia.
It is Reconquista revanchism weaponized for votes, a palingenetic and nativist chauvinism that dresses atavistic bigotry in the costume of civilizational defense. By fusing crime, faith, and origin into a single threatening silhouette, these movements convert social anxiety into ballots and North Africans into permanent suspects.
The scapegoating has widened to the occupied city’s Muslim residents. A Spanish editorial in CTXT described “violence against migrant minors and a thirst for pogroms,” documenting “calls, lists, and rounds through the neighborhoods” – a coordinated campaign it distinguished from a lone clash in which migrants stoned a military vehicle and a dozen Moroccans were arrested.
It charged that Vox manufactured the “invasion” narrative while the People’s Party (PP) rendered it respectable, and cast the far-right surge as driven by “international Trumpism.”
Through it all, the crisis has thrust the status of occupied Ceuta and Melilla back to the fore. Morocco has reiterated its longstanding historical and geographical right to the territories, a claim Spain’s Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares “roundly rejected.”
Writing in Le360, the Algerian-French novelist Boualem Sansal sharpened the irony at the heart of the dispute. In 1987, he recalled, King Hassan II asked for Morocco to join the European Economic Community (EEC), now the European Union (EU), and the request was waved away on the grounds that Morocco was not a European country.
That answer once seemed obvious. It seems far less so now, Sansal argued, because the same Europe that told Morocco it could not enter the club because it was African now insists that two cities sitting on African soil form its own frontier.
In 1987, Europe told Morocco, “you are in Africa, so you cannot come in”; in 2026, it says, “we are in Ceuta and Melilla, so Europe is in Africa.” Between those two claims, he wrote, something no longer holds. His conclusion was blunt: Europe’s borders should be in Europe, and Morocco lies fourteen kilometers away.
