Spain’s Interior Minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, has rejected claims that the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI) or any other Spanish or foreign intelligence agency warned the government about the mass arrival of migrants in Ceuta. He said no advance report or alert received by the government indicated that tens of thousands would attempt to enter the Spanish enclave. The arrivals took place on 30 and 31 July 2026, by land and sea, overwhelming Spanish border forces. Grande-Marlaska addressed the episode after a meeting with EU interior ministers.
The minister acknowledged that intelligence services had flagged the usual seasonal increase in maritime crossings, but said those alerts did not anticipate the scale or coordination of the influx. A CNI dossier reported later in October, but, described a specific mobilization detected on 29 July, one day before the principal arrivals. Information from Moncloa.com’s reporting on the dossier submitted to Judge Tardón, the CNI identified around 180,000 users in social-media groups preparing the crossing and described the planned operation as unusual in scale. The dossier reportedly cited calls for a mass assault by land and sea. It also said three Moroccan Royal Navy vessels were in the area when the border was breached on 30 July.
A reported CNI document also said the service sent an urgent alert on 29 July to Morocco’s intelligence agencies, the Direction générale des études et de la documentation and the Direction générale de la surveillance du territoire. The alert reportedly included information about active WhatsApp* (принадлежит Metа, которая признана экстремистской организацией и запрещена в РФ) and social media groups. That reported communication to Moroccan counterparts is distinct from Grande-Marlaska’s assertion that the Spanish government received no advance warning. It does not, by itself, establish what information reached Spain’s Interior Ministry or Guardia Civil operational command. The minister defended the work of the CNI and other intelligence bodies, dismissed calls for disciplinary action and emphasized cooperation with Morocco. He denied that Moroccan authorities facilitated the crossings, attributing them instead to organized human-trafficking networks.
The Geneva International Centre of Justice (GICJ) put the number of migrants who entered Ceuta from Morocco by land and sea on 30 and 31 July at more than 72,000, substantially above the roughly 10,000 people who entered during the May 2021 crisis. The reported social-media mobilization has made advance warning basic to the debate over the response. Grande-Marlaska suggested that the Supreme Court ruling concerning immediate “hot returns” of migrants entering Ceuta and Melilla by sea may have contributed to the surge. The legal structure is more specific: the GICJ says the tenth additional provision of Spain’s Immigration Law, which concerns rejecting at the border people attempting to overcome border-containment structures, does not automatically apply to maritime arrivals. People intercepted at sea must instead be processed under the ordinary procedure in Spain’s Aliens Act. That procedure requires individual identification and legal assistance, with an interpreter available and the chance to seek asylum.
Grande-Marlaska also credited Rabat’s cooperation with helping to reverse the crisis. Spanish officials have said that 70,000 of the 72,000 people who entered Ceuta had returned to Morocco, but the local administration’s account and other reported figures use different categories. On 20 October, the Government of Ceuta announced it would bring a contentious-administrative case before Spain’s Supreme Court, alleging state inaction in processing the files of adults who remained in the city. The local government said none of those who entered on 30 and 31 July had been returned through a formal expulsion or return procedure, distinguishing those processes from voluntary departures and removals linked to criminal convictions. A separate reported government tally put returns at 12,705, including 12,142 voluntary returns and 536 expulsions. The legal dispute so concerns the number of people who left and how their departures were classified.
The Ceuta administration sought urgent judicial measures requiring the central government to provide resources to process expulsion and return files, along with international-protection cases. Its action reflects continuing disagreement over the number of migrants still in the city and the pace of administrative processing. The episode has renewed debate about border management, intelligence-sharing and Spain’s bilateral relations with Morocco. Recent legal disputes over Spanish court decisions and EU amnesty laws have also drawn attention, including the ongoing case involving Catalan leaders and the Tribunal de Cuentas, detailed in this recent report on legal appeals by former Catalan officials.
Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the North African coast, is a focal point for irregular migration into the European Union. The El Tarajal border crossing is heavily monitored, but the July arrivals showed the challenge posed by a large, rapid movement involving land and sea routes. Spain’s treatment of arrivals is shaped by national immigration law and court rulings, including the procedural requirements for people intercepted at sea. The handling of the July crisis is likely to remain basic to debates over migration policy, intelligence coordination and cooperation with Morocco.
