Morocco prevents mass influx of migrants to Ceuta

Moroccan security forces repelled a mass attack on the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on Sunday. Dozens of people followed calls on social media and gathered on a hill on the border of the coastal city of Ceuta. A video distributed by local media shows police officers throwing stones at Moroccan security forces. Emergency services prevented them from approaching the border fence with Ceuta. Ceuta and another Spanish enclave, Melilla, are Europe’s only land borders with Africa.

Moroccan authorities said at least 60 people were arrested in similar operations last week. Police have been deployed in large numbers in the area around Ceuta since Friday. “The authorities have preemptively set up several checkpoints on roads leading to northern Morocco,” said Mohamed Benaissa, a human rights activist. Hundreds of migrants were bused out. Most are young Moroccans. A smaller number are from sub-Saharan Africa.

Morocco and Spain have stepped up cooperation to combat illegal immigration. In the first eight months of this year, Morocco prevented 45,015 people from entering Europe illegally, according to the Interior Ministry. Tighter surveillance of Morocco’s northern borders has led more and more migrants to take the more dangerous and longer Atlantic route to the Canary Islands.

Dozens of migrants had already taken advantage of thick fog off the Moroccan coast in late August to swim to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. A spokesman for Spain's Civil Guard in Ceuta told Reuters that many of them were intercepted in the water and on the beach in Tarajal on the enclave's southern border.

“We have mastered this with Morocco,” the spokesman said. “People who cross the border into the coastal city are always arrested by the police and returned to Morocco, unless they are minors or asylum seekers.”

The two Spanish enclaves on Morocco's Mediterranean coast, Ceuta and Melilla, share the European Union's only national border with Africa, and migrants repeatedly try to cross from there into the EU.