In Ceuta there is no emergency.
There is a system that has been running for years, one that the documentary Les Sauteurs already told a decade ago, filmed on Mount Gourougou, and that governments keep calling an “emergency” every time it makes headlines again, as has been happening for over a month now. At the end of July, tens of thousands of people crossed the border with Morocco, on foot or by swimming: most were pushed back within hours, but thousands remained in the Spanish exclave, a territory that Spain has controlled since the sixteenth century and that today has become the European Union’s external border on African soil, largely without shelter.
It is the same border that thousands of European citizens cross every day in the opposite direction without any risk, for the so-called visa run: a quick trip to Ceuta or Melilla and back, just long enough to get a fresh passport stamp and go on living, working or holidaying in Morocco for another ninety days. Weeks later, no institution can say with certainty how many people are involved: official estimates have been revised upward several times, while the most reliable figures come, paradoxically, not from ministries but from the meals distributed every day by the Red Cross and local organisations.
Behind the numbers are people.
Whole families have arrived in Ceuta, along with a great many women and unaccompanied minors, some as young as eleven or twelve. They live on the street, on the beaches, in makeshift camps, while reception facilities remain insufficient every time new places open up. The death toll among those trying to reach the coast by swimming is the highest since 2014: dozens of bodies recovered by the Guardia Civil, amid an institutional silence that broke only once the numbers became impossible to ignore.
What is striking, once again, is not only the tragedy itself but the way it is being handled.
In Ceuta the right to asylum exists only on paper: unlike Melilla, where an application can be filed directly at the border crossing, here the procedure can only begin once a person has entered the Temporary Immigrant Reception Centre (in Spanish, CETI, Centro de Estancia Temporal de Inmigrantes). Whoever remains outside is, in practice, also excluded from that right. It is the same mechanism we denounce at the European level with the entry into force of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum.
Migration is not being managed, exclusion is being made structural, pushing further and further away, in both space and time, the moment when a person can actually claim their rights.
The security-driven response tells the same story.
Troops deployed, talk of an “invasion”: these are all signs of an approach that keeps reading migration as a matter of public order rather than a question of human dignity. Italy is no exception: the suspension, on 31 July, of Schengen with Spain meant a month of tightened checks on flights and ferries, in the name of national security. Yet the two countries do not share a single metre of land border: the “block” affects those arriving by plane or ship from Madrid or Barcelona, certainly not those entering Ceuta on foot. Nor is this the first time: since 2015 it has been France keeping Schengen suspended at Ventimiglia, a genuine land border this time, with discriminatory checks that several associations, and even a local bishop, have called unlawful by now, given that renewing the suspension every six months goes well beyond the limit set by the Schengen Borders Code. When the border is real, the measure stays in force for almost a decade; when it is not, an announcement on X is enough.
More than a month after the events of late July, those following the situation on the ground, such as No Name Kitchen and Border Resistance, describe a CETI still on the verge of collapse, asylum application appointments that are practically impossible to obtain, and failures in recognising unaccompanied minors.
Adding to this climate has been an escalation of violent episodes.
Organised groups led by the far right have repeatedly stopped Red Cross convoys from reaching people camped on Trampolín beach, and in one case migrants’ personal belongings were set on fire, while local politics keeps calling for mass deportations and more militarisation instead of solutions that would stop people from dying.
It is no surprise that, in the neighbourhoods hit hardest by the crisis, spontaneous neighbourhood networks sprang up even before the institutions intervened, bringing food, legal support and protection to minors. It is there, in the active citizenship that organises itself from below despite a hostile climate, that a glimpse of an alternative to a failing model can be seen.
Ceuta shows it once again, in the stark reality of those who have died.
Leaving migration management to governments, armies and detention centres produces death.
It did not work with the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, it is not working in Ceuta, and it has never worked at any of the borders that Europe keeps reinforcing instead of opening
What does work, what we see working every day, is hospitality within families, reciprocity, sharing: the same founding values that brought Oltremani into being, even before we became a response to an emergency. Ceuta is not an isolated exception: it is yet another demonstration of what happens when Europe’s external borders are treated as a problem to be contained rather than as a place where rights must be guaranteed.
We know which side we stand on.
We will keep supporting those who, on the ground, are already mobilising to welcome people, using the same tools we use here. Because in Ceuta too, as everywhere, “oltremanizzare” means recognising oneself in the other and acting together.
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